Unrestricted Tech Trade Ruins 4xTBS Games » Forum Post by brokenguns

I think the following 3 options (game setup) would provide a quick solution:

- Tech trade is allowed without limitations
- Tech trade is only allowed if you have researched it yourself (that would be my favorite)
- Tech trade is not possible

But maybe there are some balancing concerns (at least with option 3) ... I dont know

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Hi guys, lots of good suggestions here...

Just expanding further on something Dlcupcake said.

For military technology, any USA defense company that wants to sell products internationally can do it, but the tech level has to be 1 or 2 levels behind current. And this is not just a "few" technologies that give us the edge, it is everything. They are very serious about keeping that edge. I used to design thermal weapon sights for a defense contractor and we sold a few here and there, but they were junk compared to what we use ourselves.

This is what I was thinking about. The USA would never trade its latest technology (stealth for eg.) and understandably so.

Heres another suggestion, what if the AI was made to trade only on its obsolete techs (say techs that are 1 level behind- laser 2 tradable when you have laser 3) to civs it has friendly relations with. Allow them to trade current tech with alliance civs only. You could even possibly restrict them to -2 levels for all other civs (neutral relations down). This combined with some of the other ideas suggested may help offset the issues discussed and furthermore add more weight to diplomacy measures. I thinking these are fairly reasonable and logical restrictions to place on AI.

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Heres another suggestion, what if the AI was made to trade only on its obsolete techs (say techs that are 1 level behind- laser 2 tradable when you have laser 3) to civs it has friendly relations with. Allow them to trade current tech with alliance civs only. You could even possibly restrict them to -2 levels for all other civs (neutral relations down). This combined with some of the other ideas suggested may help offset the issues discussed and furthermore add more weight to diplomacy measures. I thinking these are fairly reasonable and logical restrictions to place on AI.

I think this is the best idea so far. It adds a level of realism, and fixes the tech trading exploit.

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Just to add to what Marioflag said....

It basically comes down to two major "real world points".

For military technology, any USA defense company that wants to sell products internationally can do it, but the tech level has to be 1 or 2 levels behind current. And this is not just a "few" technologies that give us the edge, it is everything. They are very serious about keeping that edge. I used to design thermal weapon sights for a defense contractor and we sold a few here and there, but they were junk compared to what we use ourselves.

As for non-military stuff, when is the last time you heard someone like Bayer sell their formulas for their brand new drugs a few weeks after they come up with them?

If the Japanese came and handed us the technology to build giant robots, does anyone think it would take one week before we could start building them? It would take time to convert the plans, test it making it with our components, etc etc etc. And that is coming from the other side of the globe...how long would it take to do all that when dealing with and alien race, that doesn't process information like us, doesn't build things like we do, etc etc etc.

Dlcupcake you are surely better informed than me and f-22 is surely the worst example that i could do, but it was just to compare it to game mechanics.

Probably the best option would be to add options to the game instead of changing totally how the research system is because there are people which have different thoughts about tech trading. but one thing that is shared by nearly 80%-90% of users is that the actual tech trading is not funny.I would suggest stardock to add multiple path options for tech trading because it affects a lot the gameplay and some gameplay options about tech trading would be better appreciated than others fixes and addon.

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I think people have come up with some excellent points & ideas, but I'd like to throw one more out there:

Another way to work around this issue is to have another type of cost associated with trading techs -

e.g. - If you traded the tech for F22's to China, how would the US population feel? They'd be mad as heck, and
morale & approval would take serious hits. If we gave it to England, maybe a bit less, but there would still be
some grumblings.

Perhaps a good way to handle the tech trading in this game is to have it impact both of these social factors in the game -

*The less obsolete the tech ...

- and -

* the more strained of a relationship you have with the trading partner ...

... the higher the price to your own civilization's morale and approval.
I think this would certainly curtail reckless tech trading, it would emulate a real-world environment, and hopefully the AI could be taught to weigh the potential losses against the possible gains.

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I was messing around with the tech XML file.

I am trying to figure out a good way to change the AIvalue on the techs to reduce the trading. One idea I had was to increase the value more between diffrent generations would make it harder to trade older techs for newer not sure
if this helps.

I moving universal translator to the end of the tech tree and disable diplomacy all togheter. But thats really not a good option. I cant think of any other ways to affect tech trading right now.

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As someone who likes to leap ahead in the tech race, the trading that goes on really cripples my playstyle. I like the idea of limiting or turning off tech trading, but think it's a bit heavy handed. I'm in favor of givng people the option of doing things, but creating incentives/disincentives for it. The rampant tech trading that goes on does simulate "technology dispersion" that happens in real life, and by limiting tech trading you need to add that back in. A suggestion:

Researching a tech becomes easier if you are trading or have good relations with a race that has that tech. Seems to make sense of someone's freighter shows up with a spiffy new ion drive will make it easier to "discover". Same with good relations --- you're visiting, trade missions, etc.

Similiar to the blueprint suggestion, purchased techs aren't known immediately. I'd suggest taking it a step further and say that the % of research you receive is dependant on how close you are in the tech tree to what you bought. If you know Laser 1 and purchase Laser 2, you should get most of your research from that tech ("Hmmm, I see what they did, now we just need to figure out how to get it to work with our power supply/ships/ecosystem") versus knowing Laser 1 and buying Mega Blaster XXI where you would only get a small portion of it ("Hmmm, does this blueprint look upside down to you? What are those markings? We are going to need some time with this...").

I think the first part would disperse older more widely know techs and the second part would spread out the upper end of the tech tree a little more. You would end up with most races close to "average" on widely known techs but still allow some to specialize along some tech lines and being able to get some benefit from it.

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Good ideas all.

I good system would consist of a combination of

- Blueprint trading
- Only Trade these with alliance.

To offset

Make tech cheaper if the following applies

- Trade Routes to Party that have the tech
- Good Relations with a Party that have the tech
- The more Parties that have the tech.
- How long time since the first time it was discovered.

I really hope this can be done. As right now I dont value tech as I just trade what ever I can get my hands on and so do the other players, result all have the same.

And of course this should be an option as some people will not like it.

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Voqar

Join Date 03/2003

+21

The ideas I like:

1. Can only trade tech you researched yourself. Best idea so far. You really shouldn't be able to acquire tech from others and whore it around. Yeah, it limits you, but due to the utter cheese factor some practical limitations need to exist.

2. Blueprints. Second best idea. Acquiring tech from someone else should not be full acquisition, rather a large amount of research discount (maybe 75-80%, where the remaining research time represents assimilating the new tech into your empire).

3. As a tech spreads around it's value decreases. So even if you sell or trade your new tech to everyone you get less and less out of it with each deal (civ idea).

4. Can only trade tech with allies or those of like alignment - and/or you suffer greatly when trading with non allies or unlike alignments (negative diplo hits with others of your align or AIs only offter very terrible deals when you're not in harmony with them).

IMO the tech trading in Civ IV is very good in most games. It's not always the same because every game plays out differently, mostly the alliances and religious alignments that form, which are the basis of who will trade what with whom. The best parts are that Civ IV civs won't trade key techs (like new weapons or techs that give them first dibs on a wonder build) and if they don't like you they won't trade at all, and Civ IV AI's have very good memories when it comes to remembering you hosing them before over the centuries. Civ IV has a different kind of tech tree too - it's much more likely that every civ will have every tech over time.

In GalCiv2 there's more potential for significant tech leads in several different branches and it should be much harder for players to exploit AIs to fill the gaps, and tech whoring is amongst the worst cheese in this genre and needs to be dealt with.

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Here's another idea I had that is simple and will solve everything.

Everyone may only trade technology they researched.

Doesn't really work.

Example: If eight AIs each research a separate tech, then all eight can trade amongst each other and
end up with all 8 of those techs. Tthe minors would stop being a conduit of tech trading, but there
would still be, essentially, unlimited trading.

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response to post 50:

your point is great but your conclusion flawed. I also want the AI not to treat the human special. But it DOES right now!

My point is that right now the AI DOES treat the human player special by ALLOWING the Human player to buy up all the techs and then sell them off. The human player employs an OBVIOUS strategy the AI does not replicate. Any player worth their salt who makes a decision to sell a tech woudl sell it to nearly every player he or she could, to prevent the other civs from profiting from further sales of the tech.

SO when the AI allows the human player to buy a tech the AI SHOULD KNOW that the human will likely sell it off to recoup the losses of buying the tech, and should therefore sell the tech to all civs to 1. profit more and 2. deprive the buying civ the ability to profit off of THEIR research. Anything less is naiive. And a leader of an interstellar civilization should not be naiive.

MG

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Doesn't really work.

Example: If eight AIs each research a separate tech, then all eight can trade amongst each other and
end up with all 8 of those techs. Tthe minors would stop being a conduit of tech trading, but there
would still be, essentially, unlimited trading.

It would stop players from reselling techs, which would fix the exploit.

I never said tech trading was bad. I said unrestricted tech trading is. Human players can use it to gain such an advantage that the game isn't even worth playing.

Here's what I think are the best ideas so far (to be added as options) -

Limit trading of technology to only what the player has researched (to prevent reselling)

AI will only trade technology that is old compared to theirs (like -2 down the tech line)

Tech trade may only happen between allies, a tech treaty, or with good relations.

Limit the amount of times you can trade with someone, kind of like how trade routes are limited in number. (it could increase with trade research just like trade routes do)

We can also combine ideas e.g.-

Ally - Tradeable current generation technology
Good Relations - Tradeable 1 generation old technology
Neutral Relations - Tradeable 2 generations old technology
Bad Relations - Tradeable 3 generations old technology
War - No technology trading at all

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The ideas I like:

1. Can only trade tech you researched yourself. Best idea so far. You really shouldn't be able to acquire tech from others and whore it around. Yeah, it limits you, but due to the utter cheese factor some practical limitations need to exist.

2. Blueprints. Second best idea. Acquiring tech from someone else should not be full acquisition, rather a large amount of research discount (maybe 75-80%, where the remaining research time represents assimilating the new tech into your empire).

3. As a tech spreads around it's value decreases. So even if you sell or trade your new tech to everyone you get less and less out of it with each deal (civ idea).

4. Can only trade tech with allies or those of like alignment - and/or you suffer greatly when trading with non allies or unlike alignments (negative diplo hits with others of your align or AIs only offter very terrible deals when you're not in harmony with them).

I second these ideas. Out of control tech trading is total cheese.

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The AI already values tech more than the money spent to get it, and much of the time I find AIs unwilling to part with particularly strategic technology for any price (greater hull types, their best weapon/defence, planetary invasion, etc). Tech trading, as players have discovered, is beneficial to all concerned: any problem in this system is that the AI is perhaps undervaluing it's technology or trading a little more widely that they should. Frankly, taking the tradees (ie, customer) relationships into account would slow this down alot - an AI wouldn't give you a tech if they thought you might trade it to someone they don't like.

If contracts or policies are implemented, conditions could be attached to tech trades (like, 'not to the Drengin' or 'not for two years') which, if broken, would bork your relationship with that AI, particularly when it came to later tech trades.

GHETTO EDIT - as for the decreasing-return suggestion, shouldn't the AI be doing this already? It knows what techs the other AI have available for trade, so it should be doing some calculation to determine if it could get a better deal elsewhere (such that if you asked a high price for a tech one of their close allies had, they'd say no, assuming they could get it cheaper). If you're trading to the only guy in the galaxy who doesn't have x tech, he should be shopping around for the best price.

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a followup to my previous post: by increasing the difficulty level this tactic became much less feasible.

initially i would get much less cash in trades and that is only if i did manage to get a trade agreed on. eventually i did gain the upper hand in research, at which point i managed to pull a fast one and cash in big. at least enough to upgrade my entire fleet.

afterwards, relations began to drop and while I was still ahead in technology, the other AIs had plenty of techs that I wanted but I wasn't able to trade for because they asked for too much. see, when i slap down 3-4 techs and slide the BC past 5,000 and the trade response is still red, I just give up. and like i just wrote, i couldn't make that money back because the all the AIs combined would not recompensate that expense

i did play with less AI on that run though, and i know that's an important factor. so iow, up the difficulty and see how this cheesy tactic starts to dissipate somewhat

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This is definitely an issue, since if you DON'T tech trade with the AI's (as I did, since I want to make it on my own steam, not the AI's research!), they will be so far ahead of you in tech after a game year or so. I was playing with 5 opponents, was doing about 33% of the galactic research, and the AI had tech I could only dream of. Why? Because they traded everything they had amongst themselves! Therefore, if you don't do this as well you'll end up well behind the times tech-wise, even if you hate doing it.

A "No tech trading allowed" option is almost a necessity. I'd use it frequently!

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Exactly my gripe. You have to trade to keep up with the AI. The AI trade and trade and then trade some more.

When you realise you have to trade you become really good at it and its easy to get a lot of techs for free from other races.

You then end up not having to chose between Laser or Missiles. You can just trade to get the one you did not research. So choice between techs just become less important.

The result is that you dont feel like its a strategy to choose certain techs.

Give us a no tech trade option at least.

Havent seen any offical response from developer does that mean they dont see this as an issue?

I DEMAND A NO TECH TRADE OPTION.

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Exactly my gripe. You have to trade to keep up with the AI. The AI trade and trade and then trade some more.

When you realise you have to trade you become really good at it and its easy to get a lot of techs for free from other races.

You then end up not having to chose between Laser or Missiles. You can just trade to get the one you did not research. So choice between techs just become less important.

The result is that you dont feel like its a strategy to choose certain techs.

Yeah, I've been noticing that in my current game. I'm at that decision point where I'm trying to decide which main wepon branch to focus on, and which two defense techs. But it really doesn't matter.... I can just trade for everything, and there is no decision necessary.

It also makes it too easy for the other factions to counter me, if I decide to research heavily down one weapon or defense tech branch. If I beat them in battle a few times, they just quickly trade for the tech they need to counter me, instead of having to actually research it.

I'm not sure the ultimate solution is a "no trades" option, although it might be a stopgap fix until something better can be figured out. I do like doing a little horse-trading with techs. It can be fun. But there has to be a way to make it a little harder for the AI factions to "normalize" their tech levels through rapid trading.

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All of #62 sounds good to me except for the limit on how many times you can trade tech.

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Yes, post 62 has some great ideas.

Here's what I think are the best ideas so far (to be added as options) -

Limit trading of technology to only what the player has researched (to prevent reselling)

AI will only trade technology that is old compared to theirs (like -2 down the tech line)

Tech trade may only happen between allies, a tech treaty, or with good relations.

Limit the amount of times you can trade with someone, kind of like how trade routes are limited in number. (it could increase with trade research just like trade routes do)

We can also combine ideas e.g.-

Ally - Tradeable current generation technology
Good Relations - Tradeable 1 generation old technology
Neutral Relations - Tradeable 2 generations old technology
Bad Relations - Tradeable 3 generations old technology
War - No technology trading at all

Either limit trading or give the player the option to suspend it all together.

Us anti-trade researchers hate it due to cheese factor.

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Since the AI is already smart, and lets admit it tech pooling early on is a smart thing. All the AI needs is a way to track technology it sells you. So if he notices the next turn after you sold it to several civilizations he'll tell he noticed his tech got popular and that the price will go up from now.
And next time you want to buy a tech, the AI will sell you it for a high enough price so he makes the cash and not you.
This way you can tech pool in the start if it's everyone's interest and if you later on wanna trade with your friends you still can.

If however you feel like making quick cash from his discoveries, you'll get it to work once, and won't able to buy a tech for a decent price anymore.

The AI already does smarter things so I believe Brad can handle this one.

-Shiroko

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1. Can only trade tech you researched yourself. Best idea so far. You really shouldn't be able to acquire tech from others and whore it around. Yeah, it limits you, but due to the utter cheese factor some practical limitations need to exist.
2. Blueprints. Second best idea. Acquiring tech from someone else should not be full acquisition, rather a large amount of research discount (maybe 75-80%, where the remaining research time represents assimilating the new tech into your empire).
3. As a tech spreads around it's value decreases. So even if you sell or trade your new tech to everyone you get less and less out of it with each deal (civ idea).
4. Can only trade tech with allies or those of like alignment - and/or you suffer greatly when trading with non allies or unlike alignments (negative diplo hits with others of your align or AIs only offter very terrible deals when you're not in harmony with them).

I like 1 and 3 very much.
2 may be harder to implement and 4 may already be implemented.

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Can we get an official response on this issue please...

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I like the blue print idea alot. And since u could not sell until u assimlated it would slow down the trade alot. And everyone is right no coutry in there right mind would ever trade their best military tech to anything but a close ally(even then, warily in fight for their life ie US and Britian in WW2)

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Only allow 1 tech trade per turn to any race. This gives the AI the opportunity to then trade the tech you sold/traded them for their own profit or gain. I have noticed in the lastest update that they don't give as much as they did before and some techs that are futher down the tech line than I am they won't trade for anything or ALL that I have. So, I think they've fixed it quite a bit, but, I think 1 tech trade per turn to any race you have encountered would be a good implementation as well and keep the exploit down to a minimum.

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