Tech trading is bad.

from Stardock Forums
Tech trading is bad. Partly because if you head down the diplomatic tree you can’t fail to be making fabulous deals over and over again. The game is much more challenging and interesting without the constant need to go to the diplomacy screen every turn, scan through for new tech, buy it, sell it, make £’s, rinse and repeat. (If you don’t whore the tech then they do it anyway, so you might as well!). With tech-trading you get an equalisation of tech that makes everyone look and feel the same. Without tech-trading you get civilisations off doing their own thing: armour defences for one, beam weapons for another, planetary improvements for a third.
This means you have to think long term and short term simultaneously. Do you get those shields to help fight the Drengim or do I go for planetary improvements to keep up with the expanding economy of the Torians, or get some influence to cope with the Terran threat?
Furthermore you have to actually manage your early economy very tightly. No safety net of "just sell some tech" to get you out of a mess. It also means the trade goods are more significant as the only way to raise cash in a hurry.
It does take an element out of the game, but one that is so completely flawed when you’ve 9 majors and a few minors that it is a small price to pay.
Does anyone who wants a challenge actually leave tech-trading on, and why?

5,122 views 16 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Yes, because I play as Drath/Custom, and I fight proxy wars a lot. The only way to fight proxy wars properly is to prep your puppet nation with some nice techs (the ships will get blown up, and are noticed by the AI), so they can start winning the war, and you can "Liberate" some planets before they get there. Also, if the puppet nation becomes too powerful, I sell the defences to the weapons he's using, and get all the AI to jump in there. This allows me to try and take everyone at their weakest, because after 3 races conquered, all hell breaks loose.

And that's the fun bit
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
Marcathonas - That is a good use of diplomacy, I can see the fun in getting everyone to blow each other up
Star Control: Origins
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
i always play with it turned off as i prefer to find each race with its own technical abilities. I have found that this forces the AI's to act as a human would in checking the other AI's and human, ships and adjusting its tech to match.

Its good late in a game to come up against one AI that has good missiles and another that has mass drivers, as it means i have to use two different ship classes to counter each.

DG

CNTT
(Campaign for No Tech Trading)
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
I'll join CNTT. Just be careful how you say it
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I disagree. In the real world you are constantly wheeling and dealing. Also If I were playing against you are you were headed downt the diplomacy tree, you would be the first one I would hit.

Hasta La Vista Baby!
Reply #6 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Xprye,

Totally agree with you. Tech trading presents too many opportunities to level the playing field and therefore takes away the fun of playing against 9 different opponents. If they are all equipped the same, beat one, beat them all. However if they take different routes through the research tree and therefore possess different capabilities, you have to plan your strategy much more carefully, research wisely and use espionage much more effectively to identify opponents strengths and weaknesses. Diplomacy then becomes important not for gaining easy tech trades, but for keeping friendly with nations whose tech would be difficult for you to defeat just yet. Selecting a slow tech rate also makes your srategy more challenging as an incorrect choice of research path would be much more difficult to recover. However to make this work properly I believe the diplomacy aspects (particularly how you can actually coerce other races) needs to be improved. In addition, not using tech trading certainly helps compensate for some of the AI issues mentioned on other posts.

So many battles, not enough hours!
Reply #7 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
These issues don't really show up. If you aren't "whoring" the techs around, the other civs aren't either. They trade, but only around once every turn, and usually only 1 race trades a tech with another race every turn. So that means that one 1 tech is changing hands every turn, if that, and that rarely changes the game much (since most techs only take 1-3 weeks to research anyway). This means that a race only gets MAYBE 1 TECH EVERY 5 TURNS at the most through "tech trading". This was a WAY overblown "problem" that never really existed.
Reply #8 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I personally love tech trading. Great way to build up an alliance with another race, that comes in very handy later. I play at tough. Every time an AI fights a war, they adjust their weapons, so the differences between races blurrs. Tech trading is not the only reason that they will look similar. Captured tech from invasions also help a lot.

People who do not want tech trading, are those zenophobes who only want to research what they want to research, and not be bothered with the other races, until such times as they want to conqueor them. And this is a turn based game, with time to think, time to look at what the other races are doing, remeber information is worth its weight in gold pressed whatever.

this game is not a click fest, and going into the foreign relations screen each turn, to see what the other races are doing, and who is at war, and who has made peace if very important. The AI is very stingy with weapons techs anyway, and demands a high price to trade in weapons, even with other AI's. They are not trading weapons as much as stealing them through conquest.
Reply #9 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I agree with the 'over the top' call!

One aspect i would like to see is to change the diplomacy side a bit so that only civs that are at 'friendly' or 'close' can trade techs. Trade goods are a different matter and you should be able to sell them from the start (once you have the tech). But it would be nice to see the above in a future update
Reply #10 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I like tech trading so I can get a very powerful army of ships and go to war with someone. Then when they they ask for a treaty, I accept and then demand that they give me all of their techs. If they refuse, I start the attacks back up. Then I don't have to research nonmilitary related techs. They do it for me.
Reply #11 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
This was a WAY overblown "problem" that never really existed.


Spot on! Bring back tech trading for those that like it I say! People who do not want it can always turn it off.

Other overblown 'problems' that have resulted in the game being spoiled by stardock taking them out r,

Random events, people complained they happened too often and were annoying, now we do not have any

AI's declaring war too quick, now the AI's will not declare war no matter what, I was Altarians, good (choosen alignment) vs AI Yor (evil, choosen alignment), we were hostile with each another. My military rating was 30'ish (still had over 100+ military ships plus military starbases though), there's 200 military rating. Did the Yor declare war on me, NO. Thats just stupid, plain stupid.

But the end of tech trading irrates me the most! In a game I am playing at the moment a AI has ,singularity driver IV, yet he will not trade mass drivers for all the tea in china. !STUPID! Also you can offer your entire empire for a mining resource and the AI refuses, even though it would 100% win the game. Again STUPID.
Reply #12 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Spot on! Bring back tech trading for those that like it I say! People who do not want it can always turn it off.

Other overblown 'problems' that have resulted in the game being spoiled by stardock taking them out r,

Random events, people complained they happened too often and were annoying, now we do not have any

AI's declaring war too quick, now the AI's will not declare war no matter what, I was Altarians, good (choosen alignment) vs AI Yor (evil, choosen alignment), we were hostile with each another. My military rating was 30'ish (still had over 100+ military ships plus military starbases though), there's 200 military rating. Did the Yor declare war on me, NO. Thats just stupid, plain stupid.

But the end of tech trading irrates me the most! In a game I am playing at the moment a AI has ,singularity driver IV, yet he will not trade mass drivers for all the tea in china. !STUPID! Also you can offer your entire empire for a mining resource and the AI refuses, even though it would 100% win the game. Again STUPID


It's not turned off. You have to select Tech Trading "on" or "off" yourself.
Reply #14 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I agree with meglobob. Recently the AI aggresiveness "nerf" has meant that proxies are so easy. Before, I had to be VERY careful, and keep everyone at war to keep the galaxy in balance (ie the other 8 all equals and me equal to all 8 combined ). One wrong move, and it's game over, because someone else is the new superpower, and I can't do bugger all about it. I enjoyed this, it kept me on my toes.

I recently beat a race that had double my economy, pentuple my military, about double my tech, and double/triple eveything else. Except octuple ish influence. No way in hell should I have won that, but they let me build up a strike force, and I hit very quick, very fast, annexing 7 worlds in 2 turns. They were on their knees within a year, while using DL style hit and run tactics I'd kept out of conflict (their ships were better than mine too).

This is tough, large galaxy, loose clusters, abundant planets I think.

The point is, can we have aggresive killer AI again? Please? as an option?

Oh, and sorry guys, even if I did hate tech trading, I wouldn't join a group I can't pronounce without being grounded
Reply #15 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
It's not turned off. You have to select Tech Trading "on" or "off" yourself.


I knew this already skyjack, but thanks for telling me anyway!

I recently beat a race that had double my economy, pentuple my military, about double my tech, and double/triple eveything else. Except octuple ish influence. No way in hell should I have won that, but they let me build up a strike force, and I hit very quick, very fast, annexing 7 worlds in 2 turns.


Exactly my point, the AI is not declaring war, giving the player time to prepare the perfect blitzkrieg attack. Against a far, far more powerful AI I was able to take out 10 of there 33 worlds in the first 2 turns. The war was effectively over for the AI after this. The AI should have attacked me well before this happened.

Sometimes when the developers change the AI due to overwhealming demand by the players, it turns out to be worse then before. Hopefully a balance can be struck in a future patch.

Reply #16 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
The only thing I even had going for me was my econ capital (a class 34) which had 100 bil pop. I sent ships there, and sent off about 40 billion people. Come on, even if they are deep in my territory with no set destination, the AI should ask what the hell you're doing. And it would be great if you could say "oh... erm... Drengin! yeah, that makes sense. Going to kill the drengin". Then even if it makes the same mistake, it's not a case of "Really? sheesh, I'm doing you guys a favour if you lose this easy", but more "BWAHAHAHA! this diplomacy FTW!".

As long as you make it so if they don't trust/scared of/don't like you, they attempt to start one of those "stop the conquerers!" wars, it would be a really great addition to 1.3