Why don't the devs fix this?  People have been complaining about it for a long time.

But then again, maybe it's not a bug, but a feature.  Game takes forever develop.

I suppose you could mod the thing.

So by ignoring a single low-level technology until you reach this 'threshold', you're in essence bypassing this so-called balancing feature? That may explain why I've never noticed it...

And you say that both the player and AI are affected.. and from what you said I understand that each civilizations research costs double based on their own low-cost technology rather than the player's? And if so, do all of these technology costs double at the same time, i.e. when the player reaches the threshold, or is it independent for each civilization? Does anybody know what this threshold is?

And if you know the answers to my questions, where in the hell do you find this information?

Thanks in advance

I agree with you that leaving a low cost tech is not helping. The cost of most (but not all!) techs increases by a factor of 2.7-3.3 after researching a certain number of techs. This happens in 2-3 steps. But after the 2.7-3.3 inflation, no further tech cost increase happens in my games in ToA 2.03. Maybe they changed the code somewhere along the line?

I also concur about Planetory Invasion. It becomes very time consuming otherwise. But the strange thing is that not all the techs seem to be affected by this tech inflation. The RED techs most definitely are, as are the defence and engine techs, but some of the yellow techs are only marginally affected. I think the tech inflation is not a bad feature, but there should be more documentation about it. And it hits the AI really hard, at least at bright and intelligent levels.

The bad thing about how it works currently is that the races with a good base race ahead while others are left behind. Even at Intelligent.

If you run the tech rate on fast or very fast in the game setup, it will mitigate the effects of tech inflation.  With very fast tech, I can pretty much finish all the research I want to do before a game ends in a large universe with a hundred or so planets in my possesion.  As far as the AI, most of them build more research buildings than a human player would so they usually keep up, at least at the higher difficulty levels I usually play.  However, if something has changed from 2.02 to 2.03, I'll have to check that out.  I haven't had a chance to play a game all the way through with the latest version since I updated only recently.  In any case, I agree that tech inflation is too jumpy.  It probably needs to progress more smoothly and less intensely.  I've seen inflation approach 10x on weapons techs but haven't seen it much higher than 3x on the rest.

It's true, 2,7x is the max, but for EACH STEP!

@arunodayt:

I was just joking

But this issue is a bit strange to me. Somewhere else in the forum I read that higher inflation may be caused by a glitch that should be resolved by a re-install. Not sure about that though, all information I could find regarding the issue seemed pretty vague.

You can try googleing for "tech inflation site:forums.galciv2.com"

In the games I play, by the time I get to the end of one of the weapons branches, I'm usually approaching 20k capacity in research spending (looking at domestic stats including bonus research and with spending and research sliders at 100%).  Even when inflation is maxed as far as I've seen, I can usually get an extremely expensive tech like Doom Ray in a turn or two.  I'm not even building labs on every planet, so as far as I can tell, inflation is not beyond reasonable for me.  I should point out that I always run very fast tech in the game setup.  Mainly, because I like to be able to finish research before the game ends, but it also reduces the effects of inflation.

Both the universe size and the number of planets you have are a consideration.  The more planets you have, the more research you can produce.  If you haven't noticed already, tech costs scale upward with map size.  So, it's possible to have slower research on a bigger map if you're not owning a lot more planets.

BTW, I looked at the numbers again, so far I haven't seen any techs except weapons go above 2.7x.  I've seen weapons go as high as 7.6x.  However, this is just within the first 3 years of a game.  Let me know if you see it go higher.

Funny coincidence - just yesterday I have been hit by a pretty severe increase in research cost.

I was still pretty early in the game and had just completed researching the first Miniaturization tech, when the costs for the remaining techs increased by a factor of roughly 2.5 max (Railgun IV went from ~850 to ~2100 in one turn).

Usually it doesn't seem to happen that fast for me. Or maybe I just don't pay enough attention?
This time I was focusing on one tree instead of spreading out, so I guess I reached the expensive techs were it will be more noticeable earlier than usual.

Anyway, can be a pain in the a**...