I believe the best solution would be to modify unique tech prices by let's say x20 so you finally will be able to perches them if you wish but a VERY high cost.

BAD idea IMHO. Then races could pawn off their crap racial techs for a huge pile of universal techs.

It might work if the AI was smart enough to know which were the crap techs. But yeah... based on past performance, this probably just opens the door to a big player exploit for cash.

On the sidebar topic of carriers.... some countries still have carriers as a matter of national pride, or to support local defense industry. But there is only one country right now that actually has the capability to project force anywhere in the world via carriers supported by defensive screens, AWACS, satellite networks etc., and keep a carrier battle group on station by rotating additional battle groups through the theater. A carrier is no good if you've only got one or two, and no ability to actually operate indefinitely, anywhere in the world. There is also the value of real-world combat experience. It's very one-sided at the moment for U.S. carriers operating near Iraq, but it does keep the crews sharp, and provides information on the reliability of the weapon systems.

I'm not sure any of this relates to tech trading in GalCiv, except maybe for the fact that the U.S. could sell or give away this type of hardware, but it doesn't mean the country on the receiving end would have the economy to support it. It's the huge U.S. economy (ailing now, but still huge), and the huge percentage of that economy devoted to military spending, that makes modern U.S. carrier battle groups effective for force projection. It ain't the hardware, per se. Comparing ship specs doesn't tell you that much.

And this is only about 20 years after the US made theirs.

Pakistan has plans for a nuke? You mean only about 50 years after the US had them? (Not to mention the design is less complicated than an F-16).

You said that other countries are developing advanced stealth aircraft. Designing. The US has had them operational for over 25 years.

The F-15 is nothing but a supercharged Americanized MIG, and it's still pretty much one of the best fighters in the world (until they started falling apart), and we only let a few countries have them.

It's been 40 years and we're still the only nation to have perfected travel to the moon. Hell, most other countries' space programs are still amateur compared to us.

Here's the flaw. Around the world, we're still HUMANS. We're using human technology to achieve our goals. So the United States made a jet that could fly 3.3 times the speed of sound back in the 60's? It was still an atmospheric jet using propulsion technology that was known around the world. That we kept such things both secret and were ours alone for so very long is testament enough. Espionage, leaks, and eventual declassification, and suddenly everyone is making knock-off products. A lot of the technology developed around the world that you claim was "given" by the US wasn't given at all - they were reverse-engineered and then deployed. We didn't hand the blueprints for a Nimitz over to the Ukranians. We didn't dump an F-22 in the lap of another country and a team of TS engineers to give them everything they need to know. There's stuff on F-15s that other countries don't have, that you don't even know about.

I mean, seriously, please tell me you think we GAVE the plans for a nuclear weapon to the Soviet Union. Please tell me that, because that's exactly what you said. No. They said "HEY THEY'RE MAKING THIS THING THAT GOES BOOM AND USES FISSION!" "WOT? FIZSHIONZ!? FIND ME TEH NOKLEAR SIETNICTS! YOU! BILD ME TEH NOKZ!"

In GalCiv2, they're different RACES. They have different materials, different approaches to things, and they certainly have discovered different technologies. If a bunch of aliens came to Earth and gave us a flying saucer, I imagine it'd take decades before we understood exactly what we had and were able to replicate the technology. Go back in time and give an Egyptian a handgun. You think he'd understand just what the hell you gave him?

On Earth? We know flight. We know RADAR. We know of the materials that make up RAM. And we know of the angles. But not everyone knows how to make those materials and coat them on a jet and still make it fly. It's like getting the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle one piece at a time. Getting completely non-terrestrial technology would be like getting a puzzle after it's been fed through a classified document shredder.

[SORRY - posted this before I realized there was a page 2 - looks like a lot of this message is redundant at this point]



No, it needs (a) balance, and (b) realism.

Scintor, do the Russians have a different physiology than the French? No, so OF COURSE THEY CAN USE THE SAME TECHNOLOGIES. But guess what? No human civilization will ever get widespread use of pain amplification! That's just absurd.

Additionally, as technology goes, there is nothing one country on earth can learn that another cannot given time. So trading is much more of an obvious choice. If we knew that we could keep nuclear weapons to ourselves and nobody would ever stumble across it without our help, you can bet on two things. (a) we'd sell for a much higher price, and (b) we'd likely have to explain the technology in detail to others - small spy networks wouldn't work on a complicated technology that was somehow truly unique to Americans. If the Arcean have spent thousands of years learning how to turn a crap planet into a nicer one in a matter of weeks, you can bet the Drengin won't get that technology instantly. And it's not even remotely realistic for a race that enjoys pain to share technologies oriented around pain with those who don't enjoy it. But the other half of the problem is balance. So please stop arguing earth's history here when there is no correlation.

Worse still, realism is only half the problem here. Going with the "realism is more important than balance" is never the way to build a game. That's why we have arbitrary limits imposed in games all the time. It's not terribly realistic to get shot and keep kicking ass like in Half Life 2, but with total realism the game is over before you get through the first firefight. Fine for some games, but that would certainly limit the first-person shooter genre.... It's not remotely realistic to be able to command dozens of battles in real-time, but Warcraft 2 (and every other RTS) allows that because the game was aiming to be fast-paced, not realistic. Would have lost the twitchiness that made warcraft what it was if you'd had to send runners to give your orders and wait for scouts to tell you the last known battlefield positions.

Furthermore, you want to know what really isn't realistic? Constant warfare with the whole universe. You play GC2 to win, not to save lives. In the real world, warmongering empires eventually slow way down or destroy themselves. That's why we still have so many different countries thousands of years after the concept of war originated. In a GC2 world, we'd have all been united by conquest long ago.

Instead of saying "you're all wrong", I think it would be better to just state you like things how they are and move on. We want options, you prefer things set in stone, fine. But don't try to make a case against our desire for options based on yet another apples-to-oranges comparison.

I was aiming for calming the argument down semi-jokingly. If you read my post carefully you should see I was blaming him quite a bit for the situation

For size, you're right about the Admiral Kuznetsov, which is why I said generally that comparison was true. For the British Invincible class, I was being generous:


Displacement: 20,700 tons
Length: 209 m (690 ft)
Beam: 36 m (120 ft)
Draught: 8 m (26 ft)
Speed: 28 knots (52 km/h)
Aircraft carried: 20 or more, including 16 Harrier and 6 Sea King helicopters

Even given my mistaken size estimate, I was more than correct in terms of air wings - ~20 fixed-wing aircraft compared to 60+ (to account for the unspecified number of choppers). The number of planes is even less important than the type, though. Only American carriers with steam catapults can launch heavily-loaded attack bombers or even the support aircraft needed to make a carrier truly supreme - fixed wing anti-sub planes, AWACS (the Russian version can't operate off of their carrier, they have to use a chopper version), tankers, and even cargo aircraft.

Endurance is another issue - the Admiral Kuznetsov is only rated for 45 days at sea, compared to 6 month+ deployments American carriers can easily handle.

Speed is also misleading - the actual top speed of American carriers is classified, but generally believed to be 40-45 knots (if I knew for sure, I could be procecuted for telling you   ) That's why all you will ever see is "30+ knots".

Once knowledge exists it seems to have a way of propagating itself . If we want to talk about how races should not go giving away their hard earned research which is granted to the because of how they think about the universe then only the Terrans would be able to go anywhere.

The backstory claims the Terrans gave away HyperDrive. I'd assume this means they sent over some scientists as well to explain to the other civs how it works.

Which brings up something that's been bugging me for a while-why is it we have to research Universal Translator? Shouldn't we already have it before the game begins, per the backstory? Did the Terrans give away HyperDrive without even knowing what the other races were saying?

I find it equally misleading that the Drengin have been interacting with other civs (Torians and Arceans at least, I believe) for a good ~75,000+ years, yet they still have to research Universal Translator as well.

Only two examples, but the rest should be obvious.

Nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers would easily fit in a general "tech tree", as eventually everyone researches that.

Something like Weather Control being UNIQUE means that, for any reason, it's utterly beyond the comprehension of another race. Atomic theory was NOT beyond the Soviets, thus they can research it and use it. For whatever reason, the Drengin have absolutely no way of comprehending weather control, and as such I see no reason why just giving them the tech should be possible. If they could understand it, they could research it normally, but they can't.

The Iconians are the ONLY ones with access to precursor technology. Nobody else would be able to understand the fundamentals.

As for hyperdrive being 'unique' to the Terrans, it wasn't, as it was based on Arcean Stargate technology. However, the backstory doesn't explain why the Terrans can't talk to the Drengin and Arceans, at any rate. Whatever.

Using this logic, as soon as I culture flip a Drengan world, I should be able to use any of their pain amplification technologies. The ability to culture flip a world, which is built into the core of the game, negates all this talk of things built around unique phisology!

Scincerely,

[email protected]

Most of the time, I feel like the game's back-story doesn't jive with the actual game. To be honest, I'm not particularly interested and don't pay much attention to it. It's good to have a story behind the game, but they need to put a little more effort into making it actually apply.

Yeah well you can also fit half a million people into a ship less than a hundred meters long and take over an entire planet in less than a week. If you're going to use the game's inconsistencies, I suggest you start somewhere else.

Yes, indeed! As long as we're willing to accept that the Drengin techs will only affect worlds that were culture flipped. Wouldn't that be fun? Oh let's see, do I really want to trade for pain amplification? How many of my worlds contain culture-flipped Drengin or Korath? Or do I want to pay out my ass for weather control so I can get a boost to two or three planets?

You may want to consider how absurd you sound before actually making such responses. The culture flipping doesn't "negate all this talk" in any way. Unless you play a game where you never colonize anything, and only culture flip one race, this argument is practically worthless here.

Hmmm, I may have lost exactly where you two where going with this, but he does have a point surely?

IF, (Big If) we are trying to apply logic to any of this, surely if you culture flipped a planet with 6bn Drengi on it would would instantly learn their entire tech tree near enough. Since surely there are going to be hundreds of thousands of drengi scientists would know all their racial techs, but have become some enamoured with your culture that they rebelled over to you.

Forgive me if this has been said before more subtlety, but in order to make this game work at all we have to suspend logic and reason and just have fun pressing the buttons.

Irrelevant. You said nobody else could have it, and they do. You are wrong. Furthermore, it might have been 40 years ago that the Nimitz was build, but it's still the US's top carrier class. The next carrier class isn't even slated to start building for another 7-8 years.



No, Pakistan exploded a nuclear device several years ago. Again, you said they can't have it, and they do. Time is irrelevant, you are still wrong. Try to keep up. Oh, and keep telling youself that. Arranging a fissionable block to wildcat on command is a lot more complicated than a fly-by-wire aircraft, even if the frame is computer controlled.




Further proof you can't comprehend what you are reading. I never mentioned stealth aircraft. That was someone else.




I don't know where this came from, but so what? I contest that it's one of the best in the world. It's the 4th or 5th best fighter in our own fleet. (in certain roles the relatively weak F-117A outdoes it) There are 2 times as many F-16s on duty as F-15s (522 F-15s and 1280 F-16, according to the air force's webpage) and nearly 3 times as many F-18s. ~1400 F-18s is the best estimate I could find. The Russian Su-30 is as manueverable as an F-22, but lacks the speed. The X-31 (experimental) and the F-22 are the only U.S. fighters that can easily execute a J-turn (Herbst manuever) but the Russians have 3 planes that can, the Su-27, the Mig-35 and the Su-30. (The Herbst maneuver is notable in that it involves throwing the plane into a stall) Kinda shoots huge holes in that F-15 superiority, huh?



Please quote me where I said gave. You can't, because I didn't. I said they had them. Not the same thing as we gave it to them.

The rest of the arguement is systemically useless. The fact of the matter is that technology has been a race between us and the Soviets/Russians since the 50s. You keep bringing up examples of supposed US superiority and how no one else has that technology, and in many cases (not all, but many) you are wrong about that superiority. You also say a lot of what the rest of the world has was not because the US gave it to them. You forget that the Soviets and Russians have always been more generous with their high tech for the right price.

How does that apply to GalCiv? Well you started out saying that you didn't want unique techs traded. Then at one point a dev asked which techs (not unique techs but techs) should be untradable, and you said all of em. Someone asked you why don't you just play with tech trading off, and you tried to backpedal, and say you just meant unique ones. Well, in the rest of your post to me, you talk about how we wouldn't be able to understand what to do with a UFO some alien race might gift to us. So that implies you don't want trading of hulls, engines, sensors or life support techs. Then you talk about how an ancient egyptian couldn't understand a firearm if we could time travel and give it to them. So that shows you don't want weapon tech trading either.

Similar arguments could be made for every branch of the tech tree. So again, I am forced to wonder...why don't you just play with tech trading off? By your own arguments, tech trading lacks any sort of realism no matter HOW the devs limit it, and apparently that really bothers you.

Hmm...why did it quote certain quotes twice?

Remember, everyone, we love to justify ourselves with real-life examples; but, at the end of the day, all we really want is balanced gameplay.

Tech whoring is not balanced. We need a no Tech Brokering.

Unique tech trading defeats the very purpose of uniquetechs.

No tech trading pretty much shuts down trading. Boring! Brokering?

We can make real life examples, but really what's important is the gameplay.

For unique tech trading, at best we would want an in-depth analysis of the backstory relations between the races and their techs, and then a gameplay balancing, but that ain't gonna' happen.

So No Unique Tech Trading!!!!!

I think that pretty much sums up the whole issue right there. One of the big features is that each race is different. Allowing them to put all those special characteristics into one big grab bag for everyone to use does seem to negate that.

Yes and no. No one in this discussion thinks that Tech Trading as it stands does not need a big fix. What I and others are arguing is that simply banning it is not the answer. Right now trading technologies is too cheep and easy. What is needed is a way to make it more ballenced without making it illeagal. The other point is that anything that requires a major overhaul will probably not happen until GalCiv III.

What is likely to happen:
Most unique racial techs will be flagged no trade, no steal. Tech trading will continue as before with a few less techs avalible on the market.

What I would like to see as a solution (but probly will not happen):
Instead of getting a tech a outright when you trade for it or capture it, you would gain a space on your technology tree to start researching the technology. Buying or capturing a tech that is on your tech tree would give you research toward that tech when you do actually research it. So instead of instantly getting Impulse Drive when buying it, it appears on you tech tree the first time (if not already there,) The second time you get 25% of the research needed to finish the tech, and so on. There would need to be a check to insure that each tech can only be sold once between any two races.
This would insure that buying high end techs would still require significant research time before use, and I would even agree that research times for 'unique' might need to be doubled or even quadrupled for an alien race. You could still get specific alien techs if you are really willing to work for them, but the free for all would be severely limited.

Scincerely,

[email protected]

At the tip of this issue is the feasability involved in making changes. I'd be surprised if the devs are willing to completely rewrite the code that handles tech trading. I agree the best we can reasonably hope for is techs flagged as no trade/steal. We may see nothing done at all. I have a feeling that something seemingly simple as making unique techs more expensive would involve a lot of changes and/or extra coding the devs may not be willing to do for this expansion. Of course, the devs always seem to have a few surprises for us. Look at how much new content was added for DA alone. TA is already going to dwarf DA in that regard.

For each tech that isn't flagged off as non-tradable in the .xml file, there's a "WillingnessToTrade" variable that runs from 0 to 100 (maybe it's 99). Doesn't that set the effective cost of the tech? If so, then it's an easy thing for the devs to adjust, or for the players to change as a mod.

Between that, and the "CanBeTraded" and "CanBeStolen" flags, there's a lot of flexibility for adjusting this to taste. The only thing we can't do, as far as I can tell, is set up a no brokering rule, or impose a "sell it only one time" limit. That would have to be hard-coded, I think.

These adjustments in the .xml files should give most of us what we're looking for, at least in the sandbox game. Metaverse players will need to continue browbeating the devs to get these changes in the stock game.

Scintor and a few other tools who are pro- unique tech trading seem to think that it would utterly cripple the game.

Over everything I still prefer my own: If you do not have the tech on your tree, you can not trade for it, or steal it, or have it at all. This means that a race designed around not having research buildings can't just *poof* grab some and suddenly get a massive bonus, because it augments their abilities that were in-place to offset their lack of research buildings.

This will still mean that most races can trade 99% of their tech trees with most races.

This also means that races like the Drengin / Korath can logically trade their techs to each other, as they can both use them, but they can't give Pain Amplification to the Iconians or whatever.

And again, if the devs don't do this for you, then you can mod it yourself in the tech tree .xml files. Or wait until someone else does it.

Make a copy of the tech tree folder for every race you want to play. Edit those .xml files as per your suggestion, which can be done with the CanBeTraded and CanBeStolen tags, so that none of the other races will ever trade you anything you don't have on your tree. But they'll trade everything else. You can customize races like the Drengin and Korath so they have full trading with each other, if you want. Or block trading between ancient enemies like the Iconians and the Yor. Whatever scenario you like. Each edited copy of the tech tree folder will then be tailored for the player using that race, and no other.

Then whenever you want to play a sandbox game as that race, just copy that (edited) race's tech tree folder into the default tech tree folder location. I know you want the devs to do this as the default condition, but it's available as a back door option through modding. It just won't work for Metaverse scoring.

Uh, no you can't. Because it certainly doesn't stop the AI from still abusing it, it just shackles the player. How do you make Drengin and Korath able to trade their pain techs, but only with each other?