Yeah, I first saw the pic in the Grey Godfather AAR on the MoO3 forum. It still continues to amuse.

I agree. I really like this idea as well.

I also think each tech that can be traded should have a minimum relations requirement. You shouldn't be able to grab the best techs from someone unless they trust you and the best of their technology should only be given if you have perfect relations.

The problem with that idea is that the AI damn-near gives away techs for free every 8 turns anyway. A "coalition" where they shared unique techs wouldn't be any different from anyone else, really.

I still insist that the best idea is that if the tech isn't somewhere on your tech tree, you don't get to have it. No way, no how.

This continues to be a horrible idea - if you play Altarian, you may need better morale buildings. If you're Thalan, you may need all kinds of techs to boost your ability to get up and running.

If all of the races had relatively balanced access to various kinds of technology, your idea might have merit, but since some races' tech trees are designed to give them rather vast holes in their development and other races have extremely well-rounded access to everything important, your idea would just cripple some races for no real benefit to the game as a whole. Also, tech trading would almost entirely out for some races (like the Thalan Empire) who have very little that's shared with other races.

Absolutely. I think that the lack of techs in a certain area should make you find friends rather than crippling you. I really like the idea of only the originating tech being able to trade it because it solves all the problems and gives the really good impression that the trading civ is the only one that really understands the science. Imagine the US telling somebody that layering three chemicals in a certain way lets you absorb radar. It doesn't really give much help if you want something more advanced, does it?

No, it's not a horrible idea, given how many people play with zero tech trading *COMPLETELY*.

If you're dying because Altarians need a morale tech, you did something seriously wrong. If you're doing that badly, raze some farms, learn how to play, races were designed a certain way for a reason.

What's the point of having unique tech trees when certain penalties, like the Yor having no concept of a democratic government, are overcome by dumping cash into a minor race?

There should be a list of techs that just won't work for a civ, I agree, but it takes a lot of depth out if you can't trade any unique techs. A lot of them could realistically be traded, and work well. Making those tradeable in games where people want to trade techs would be more realistic and make more sense, in addition to providing the difficult dilemma of whether to trade your unique techs.

First, that's because tech trading is an optional setting. Second, people primarily have experience playing that way in DL and DA, and we're still testing TA. People have already said that playing with tech trading off for some races makes them increasingly ineffective.



So you're arguing that the first draft of the tech trees that we got are perfect and unassailable? We're still in beta, supposed to be testing and providing feedback. In my experience, Altarians don't have the same capacity to deal with morale as other races. The difference between using the max morale available to Altarians with no farms and using the max morale available to another race with farms is huge. I mean, it's immense, especially considering the increased ship maintenance costs - and yes, I am speaking from experience. I had to trade for the top end Torian morale structures so I could use farms to build a tax base to finance my navy.

I certainly did not say I was dying without those morale techs. I was saying that the Altarians are at a disadvantage because they only get the base buildings for three different lines of morale improvements. Other races get to pursue those improvements to their fully upgraded conclusion, which - you may have noticed - is a fairly large advantage over a race that has not fully upgraded those buildings. If the Altarians can't trade for that technology, they'll get outproduced.

Oh, and please kindly take your "learn to play" comments back to the WoW forums. I haven't implied that your ability to play this game is subpar or incompetent, so kindly please extend me the same courtesy. And while you're at it, please address more experienced players who are saying the same things I've been saying? KTHX.



What's the point of having unique tech trees when they leave certain parts of the game sub par or even broken for races with deliberately spotty tech trees?

Seriously, if it bothers you this much that you can trade racial techs, you can play with tech trading off. Why do you want to restrict tech trading so harshly that playing some races means you might as well be playing with tech trading off anyway? Just click that button and you'll get the game you want.

In fact, please play the Yor, the Iconians, or the Thalan with tech trading off, with a minimum of challenging difficulty. You'll see what I'm talking about.

Well, two things.

1) Thanks for supporting my point. So instead of fixing problems with the tech trees, you'd rather keep this lameo everyone-blends-together-by-midgame crap we have now?

2) Altarian tech tree is the Drath tech tree. So... yeah, they're fine.



Because having tech trading completely off eliminates a vital part of the game. Where's the fun in selling plague cure? Then there's what you propose, where every race should no longer have a unique tech tree. You indirectly want to go back to just one big tech tree for everyone.

Here's the key word about unique technologies. UNIQUE.

If you have such a problem that you want to keep the lousy-ass tech trading shittapalooza everyone and their mother has hated since the game was first on store shelves, go complain about getting those tech trees fixed.

You, however, are endorsing lousy AI behavior, and you also support elimination or at least dilution of the entire reason most people bought TA in the first place: RACES THAT ARE FINALLY UNIQUE.

I can't help but feel that at its heart, your argument is based on Metaverse point whoring. I've not seen ANYONE who enjoys the tech trading as it is now. Just about all agree that it's broken, the AI abuses it, and you end up with everyone having each others techs.

You appear to be the one exception. I really don't know why I'm justifying myself to you, because I suspect only after traumatic brain injury brought on by, say, a swift blow to the head, would one find the tech trading system even BORDERLINE acceptable.

Playing with tech trading off is an extreme solution, and cuts out a good portion of the game. However, playing with tech trading on is the other extreme - it's stupidly ridiculous that I go to trade some techs with the Drath and I can throw worthless "Unconventional Warfare" techs at them and get ICONIAN techs from them back.

Well, I only play with Tech Trade Off since it's possible. Insta-selling of any tech to anyone is just immensely abusable and "unrealistic" (as in "nonsense" : imagine how we would "sell" nuclear plants tech to a Neanderthalian-level culture).

As long as it won't be possible to limit it severely - no trading of race techs, no trading above something researchable by the "buyer", selling giving only part of the tech (RPs) and not 100%, etc - I don't think I'll turn it on again.

So basically I agree with the first post but would even like more restrictions.

My vote would go for two new checkboxes in addition to the "no tech trading" checkbox which should keep most people happy (although I am sure endless debates will arise re metaverse game standards):

(a) No Unique Technology Trading
(b) No Technology Brokering

I would imagine that (a) should be fairly easy to implement but that (b) could be trickier.

Franbo

1) Some techs should be marked "untradable". Mostly techs that doesn't make any sense to trade, more than techs that could be "exploited" in another's hands.

2) Techs shouldn't be tradable by anyone but the originator of the technology. Drengin technology should ONLY be sellable by the drengin, Krynn tech by the Krynn, etc.

3) Minor races shouldn't be able to trade -any- unique technologies. Only the most basic "mainstream" technologies or even arguably no technologies at all.

4) Unique technologies should be flagged as dramatically more "expensive" for trading, by the AI. 3-4 times when selling, and 1.5-2.5 times more when buying unique techs from the player.

This is exactly what I want. It's depressing that we probably won't get anything though.

This forum is usually a lot more polite than most, but unfortunately that also makes it a lot less entertaining.

They're definitely going to need more options for tech trading in the game setup. Personally, I play DA with tech trading off, but for TA, it has a much larger effect. The previous suggestion about adding options for no tech brokering and no unique tech trading is the solution in my mind. Though, I'll probably still play TA with tech trading off. I really like the way a race develops on its own track without it. If in the final release, a race is dependant on it to perform, I'll take them out of the game. I assume there's still 11 races and 9 slots in TA.

That's slightly worrying for me as a player who turns OFF tech trading and has already paid upfront for TA. It's strange since one of the things I was originally excited about was playing against races with different tactics depending on the techs they have.

Some unique racial techs are off-limits, but the list needs to be expanded. It already covers many of the techs that just aren't logical, but it should cover more of the "flavor" techs that make each race feel different.



This might help a little, but the "no brokering" idea might not be as affective as people think. If the Drengin want to sell off a tech, why wouldn't they sell it to everyone? That's what I usually do as the player. When a tech becomes strategically less valuable, or I just need the cash, I'll flog it to everyone that doesn't have it in that same turn, to maximize my profit. Then everyone has it, and it's the same end-result as if it had moved from the Drengin to the Krynn, from the Krynn to the Drath, and so on. No real difference in how far tech can spread and homogenize the tech trees, unless the Drengin preferentially sell to only one race and not the others.

Speaking of which.... THAT might be a rule that could help limit tech spread. What if certain techs (or maybe all techs) were flagged so they could only be sold by the originator, and also only be sold one time? It's an arbitrary limitation, but it would still allow some tech trading while keeping the brakes on homogenized tech trees. You'd never have more than two races in a game with the same unique racial tech. Also you'd have to think carefully about who you were selling it to, since it would have more strategic advantage if everyone else can't get it.



The no brokering rule would take care of that, because (AFAIK) the minors only have vanilla, DA-style tech trees with no unique racial techs of their own.



I don't know if I would make them that expensive, but yeah... they should be valued pretty highly. Especially if there was a "you can only sell it once" rule, to limit the spread.

I just want to point out that the things I'm suggesting aren't "choose one". They should all be implemented. Note that I'm not suggesting that unique tech trading should be turned off completely - just severely restricted. Between only being able to buy it from the originator, severely restricting the number of tradable techs and the AI valuing the unique techs much, much higher in the context of trade, the "everyone is the same anyway" would pretty much die.

It would, however, be a boon to those that play the diplomacy-game and the spy-game.

Addenum:
At the moment, there's only two options. "Every Tech Tradable" or "No Tech Trade". The first leads to every civilization being the same, completely negating one of the big things with TA - unique tech trees. I prefer my chocolate ice cream seperate from my citrus-fruit ice cream, thanks. In the second, much of the game is lost, especially in the trade/diplomacy department. None of these options are "viable" to me. This is a very serious issue and needs to be fixed.

That's a false dilemma. I've been arguing to fix the tech trees.



No, it's not. It's based on it.



Don't you think it's more effective to argue against what I posted instead of arguing against a distorted parody of what I posted?



Oh, yeah. Posting in all caps in a giant font is an effective counterargument. Volume sure makes up for the lack of point.



As if I haven't been posting about holes in some of the civs' tech trees for the past month, right? Because saying that I don't want tech trading to be massively limited as you demand, that means that I am somehow completely incapable of posting on this other topic, right?



Yeah, yeah, we get it: Caps lock is cruise control for cool.

I don't support either of those things. I support not completely eviscerating technology trading.



Ooh, you're attacking me instead of my arguments? No, you've been doing that all along. Try this: Check my account. I have exactly one game on my Metaverse account. Check when I registered - that would've been four years ago.

Please explain to me how my 2700-something ranked self wants to point whore and has been point whoring? Hell, look for my involvement in the Metaverse forum while you're at it.



Well, since you're apparently speaking for the entire GalCiv2 player base at this point, maybe. I'm not seeing a lot of people agreeing with your demand for a sweeping tech trade nerf.



It's what you want - to not trade unique techs. Go for it. Play that way. Have fun.

Also, I'm not even arguing against expanding the list of techs that can't be traded. I've argued in favor of making stuff like weather control and biosphere modulators untradeable. I do not believe that every single racial tech is so unique that it needs to be untradeable, but I do think that each race has some techs that define it enough that they should not be traded.

And I certainly am not arguing against adding further start up options like "no trading of racial techs at all".

Also, yes, the Drath and Altarian tech trees are very similar (although Altarians have stuff the Drath do not). That doesn't tell me that the Altarians are fine, it tells me the Drath could use some more morale boosting in their tree too - but I haven't played them and their war profiteering ways to know how much difference that makes.

With the current system, in long games, by the end, every AI has given each other every tech they have. They effectively play with just one big tech tree. Everyone has seen this happen, everyone knows it happens, and I dare you to deny it.

By supporting this behavior (yes, I stand by what I said), you want to eliminate the racial tech trees. And you said it yourself: because you think the game is too hard.

Maybe I was too subtle for you before. LEARN TO PLAY. You complain about the Thalans. The only problems the Thalans have is that "Very Slow" technology rate can cripple them, they're stupidly boring and slow to start, and their tech tree is bugged and is missing a lot of parts (ie: removing "space militarization", which gives you 'battle stations', which is the first part of any weapons on a starbase. Without battle stations, you can add no weapons).

However, I play on 'Tough'. Meaning the AI is playing under the same rules I am. Even with tech trading off, the Thalan AI (as if the AI is smart enough to purchase techs it knows it needs anyway) almost always ends up wit a military twice the size of anyone else. They control half the galaxy and they're damn-near unstoppable. I hate playing with them because they assimilate everything. I'd think a simple AI would be match for a complicated human brain, but I guess not.

Same thing with the Altarians. You claim that the tree is "based on" the Drath tree. No, it *IS* the Drath tech tree, with four of their own techs in there. Oh sure, they lost the special Drath techs, like War Profiteering (oddly, nobody complains about them having a poor economy). And one of their techs is worthless and does nothing. And the other three or four are 'ethical good' techs.

The only complaint I've heard about Altarians is morale, and that seems to ONLY be because they don't have the Temple of Whatever that the Drath have.

However Frogboy also said the Altarian tech tree wasn't finished, so claiming that we should keep the broken tech trading because the two newest and untested races need it is asinine, to say the least. I think even you could agree with that.



Look again. I see at least 3 people a few posts above yours that mostly agree with me, and do support an overall change in tech trading that would severely limit it. Maybe they're not as draconian as I am about it, but they sure as hell support more restrictions than you do.

There is no reason to have tech trading off in this game, at all, except to curb AI 'insider trading' abuse. That is why they turn it off. Didn't it ever strike you odd that a rather significant part of the game had a toggle? Can we turn off warships too?

The AI abuses the crap out of tech trading. PLAYERS abuse the crap out of tech trading. It is broken, completely, every part of it is. There isn't a single even slightly half-assed reason you can give for supporting the ridiculous nature of the tech trading we have now. The closest to any sort of argument for keeping it was "ITS TOO HARD :SNIFF:"

Don't try to tell me "not a lot of people agree" when almost every post in this thread has been supporting a tech trading change, and you want to keep it damn-near as-is.


-- By the way, if you're going to accuse someone of ad hominem attacks, you'd probably look a lot less stupid if you didn't do it yourself through your entire post. Me? I don't care, I think your opinion is foolish (actually, I'll be frank, I think it's stupid, idiotic, retarded, etc.), but hey, don't blame me, it might be because I'm not the one trying to argue my point by complaining about fonts.

Hmm, that's actually a good point. With limited planetary space, 25% buildings are still tricky, but all planets but homeworld are generally limited to 6 billion anyway. Guess I should pay closer attention to the less tangible benefits of certain techs/structures.

-----

Sheesh, what a thread. Uranium and Phaedyme, you two stop your bickering, damn it. I tend to agree with Uranium's beliefs that trading needs some level of nerfing, but dude, chill! We all know the trees need balance, hence the beta. Phaedyme's position isn't really even that different from yours.

Now if only the game weren't in a feature freeze, so they could make tech trading a more diplomatic situation.

I'd love to see options for everything posted, I think, but what about these:

--- Max techs that can be learned "for free" per turn (default unlimited)

If I trade techs with the Altarians, I have limited resources to absorb the information. Maybe I have to be really careful with what I trade, because I can only learn one new technology per turn, so if I trade for something sub-par, I cannot nab any more techs that turn. I have to wait until the next turn to get *any* tech trading, and many turns if I want tech trades from the Altarians.

--- Minimum relations to trade technologies (default any)

If you're not at the set relations with the given empire, you cannot trade any technologies, period. The level of trust just isn't there for whatever reason.

--- Minimum relations to get unique techs (default any)

If you're not at the set relations with the given empire, you cannot get them to give you unique technology. This would be a great one to set to "Ally" to really make the AI care about alliances. The Yor can do amazing things with Weather Control (okay, who can't?), but the Arceans won't even consider it until they're allies. The Yor have a tough decision to make, don't they? And it forces you to really think before declaring ANY wars. If you start an "unjust" war and cause people to not trust you, forming alliances gets far more difficult, which means tougher time getting unique techs.

But if you don't like that, you set it to "Friendly" instead, or something. Still makes diplomacy more important, but not critical.

--- Maximum tech value for trade (default unlimited)

Any techs that are above some "value" (probably an arbitrary 'usefulness' value since some cheap unique techs are really great) simply cannot be traded for. This probably isn't necessary since they already have the extra tech trade flags, but who knows, might create a nice blanket effect by limited tech trades to only the really basic stuff.

--- Unlock all tech trading (default off)

For the power gamers out there, all tech is available to trade, steal, etc. This would be non-metaverse I'd imagine, because of how abusable it could be. But it could make for a fun mashup of techs for people who just want to see how silly a race can become.

I feel like I need to say thet there are some players who enjoy tech trading quite a bit like myself. I campaigned against the earlier trading nerfs (successfully I might add.)

Whether you like tech trading or not depends entirely on your style of play. I have been an active player and beta tester for a long time and I do not participate in the metaverse. I tend to like empire building and management above all. If I can play and win a game without ever declaring war, so much the better. In fact, I usually turn influence victories off because they end the game too soon for me.

The idea that the Korx or the Terrans would not try to collect and trade as many techs as possible for their advantage as possible just seems silly to me from their backgrounds. My complaint has always been that none of the AI races ever try to use this as a path to victory. It just seems natural that the Korx or Terrans would try to build a big economy and buy the galaxy!

The solution to me has been that instead of trying to stop human players from tech trading their way to victory, we should teach the appropriate AIs to do so.

Takeing technologies from across the galaxy to get the best for your people just seems to be natural way that sucessful empires expand. Looking into the Roman advances, you find quite quickly, that most 'Roman innovations' came from one of the peoples that they either traded with or conquered. The motto of the United States of America is 'e pluribus unim' whic referrs to their taking peoples and ideas from everywhere to make their society stronger. The Solviet Union stole their way to power with their extensive spy system, taking evey good idea or technology that they could locate. The Japanese are probably the best example of all. They created neary no basic technologies of any kind, but once they got their hands on a new technology, they were masters of modifying and improving it.

I say all of this to say, why do people seem to think that is an invalid method of galactic conquest? If the human player has a significant advantage over the AIs, then improve the AIs. You just sound like a French Socialist saying 'we have to keep our culture pure, no one may say le hamburger.' If a neighboring empire has a better technology than I do, of course I want it!

Yes, everyone tends to get all the best technologies from everyone else near the end of the game. To me, that just makes the game more realistic. I don't want things nerfed, I want them enhanced! I lobied very hard for an expanded trading AI as well as an enhanced spying AI that would allow many more playing strategies and victory paths.

Right now I hear 'I want to win when I am playing Drengin because I am the most Drengin that anyone can be!' In history, that has always been a losing strategy, and I don't see why it should be any different in the game.

Now I will admit that I may be in a different situation than many in that I tend to play huge games that take a week or more to play out. If you are playing 2-3 games a day, I can see how you might get bored as things tend to even out toward the end of a game. I just see it as a natural progression of people moving toward what works.

Scincerely,

[email protected]

Uh, yeah, and you can't always get it. The United States has nuclear weapons, guess how many countries want those? What about F-22s, AIM-120s, even supercarriers? Our space program?

In GC2, you just hurl money at a minor race, and you can have whatever you want. Damn near any technology the AI has can be acquired, no matter how ridiculously valuable it is. Weather control centers? If I were the Arceans I'd never let that go, even to my allies, not without payment in the form of a few planetary systems.

The fact is that the tech system is broken.

It's "All" or "Nothing". Some people want to trade, like you, every damn thing they can. Some of us (and most of us, from what I'm gathering of this thread), want tech trading to be very restrictive.

So at one end of the scale, we have zero tech trading. I don't think many people are happy with this, but use it ONLY because it is infinitely more balanced than tech trading ON.

Then at the other end there's the technology free-for-all.

Some people like playing with a few planets. Some people freak out if they don't have anything less than 100 colonies and 400 battleships with 590 attack each floating around. Thankfully we have options to change that.

We DON'T have options for the tech trading, however, and as this thread indicates, a huge amount of people aren't happy with ANY of it.

That's the options I want.

- No trade brokering. I will likely rarely use this, but that's because I'd use another option. But from what I hear, it's a pretty popular idea.
- No unique tech trading. Again, not what I would use, but still popular.
- No non-native tech trading. This is what I'd use. This is the "if it's not somewhere in your tech tree, you don't get to use it" option. No more Yor abusing trading to build enormous economies. No Torians with research worlds full of Discovery Spheres with 800 research points.

That's what I want, and that's what we need. More options.

That's all anyone here has wanted, and all the "lol tech tradin ru0lz" people are pretty much saying "SHUT UP ITS FINE LOL". Yeah, it's NOT fine, and I get the impression most people hate it.

Your history is your weak point. Many countries have functional equivilants of all the things you mention. 5 countries have supercariers, six countries are developing advanced stealth intercepters and about 30 countries have access to them by treaty (NATO or the European Union), Every developed country with a modern air force has a medium range air to air missile bought from one of the major arms producing nations. As for nuclear weapons, didn't a whole bunch of countries get the plans to build one from a small country called Pakistan a few years for peanuts compared to developing it themselves? Another small country called North Korea sells advanced weapons systems to any country who has the cash, as did Yugoslavia until their break up.

There has only been one program that sucessfully developed nuclear weapons from scratch; the joint US/Brittish of WWII. Every other nation who has them either stole the plans and copied them, were given them by an allied nation, or bought them from another country.

The problem is not that technology is passing from one race to another, it's that the ways that its happening are not ballenced.

I use tech trading in a very specific fashion. I research cheap, early techs quickly and trade them for other races early techs, planets, or cash until my midgame economy stabilizes. I not only do this for cash, but also to achieve certain strategic goals in the early to mid game.

I sell or trade early weapon and defence techs so that no race gets too weak too early in the game. Otherwise some races always seems to forget to arm themselves and are destroyed at leisure by another race. I also give away trade techs and economic techs as this allows me to pacify them and gives them more cash for trading. I also sell farming and planetary improvement techs as it tends to keep their colony worlds from developing too quickly.

Some people seem to call this an exploit that needs to be gotton rid of. I just think that the AIs need to learn how to do the same, especially the Terrans and Korx. This would allow strategies like the one that ended the Cold War, economic superiority with out a final clash of arms.

Yes tech trading needs a lot of work, but what it needs is upgrading not nerfing.

Scincerely,

[email protected]