Tech trading off option

from GalCiv2 Forums
Turning tech trading off really changes the game. I am normally a tech trading whore to in order to keep up. With it off, you really have to focus on what you want. I usually just concentrate on building my economy first. In this game at least, I have found myself getting picked on a lot more than normal. I was at war with three powers within two turns of each other. The Drath, Yor, and Iconians all at the same time. I was behind badly in everything that you need to make a decent fleet. I was behind in logistics, hulls, miniaturization, and weapons. Of course I switched my priorities to these things. In the mean time I just avoided battles unless it was a transport or a fleet with a transport in it. I lost 8 starbases to their fleets. A couple of them I lost twice just trying to keep their constructors off the resources. Lucky for me the Yor went to war with the Iconians also. They quickly ask for peace with me, which I gladly accepted, and the soon I was at peace with the other two also, as they all started fighting each other. A couple hours more of playing, and it is just me and the Yor. It was mostly thanks to one planet. All my planets were crap except for one class 8 planet. It had a 700% bonus tile for manufacturing. Without it producing ships, I would have lost for sure.

I guess I am boring you with my little story to make the point on how much the game changes when techs are not traded. Diplomacy techs are much less useful than they were before. I don’t think I will ever turn it on again. It’s much better this way.
5,232 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Interesting , the opposite has been said.

What other settings were you on folkewolfe ?


Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
No tech trading is a different game. Tech is more valuable, which means a couple of things:

• Getting tech via espionage might make it espionage more valuable since
• Invading is more powerful due to the free tech. After all, if you can’t trade – just invade!
• You don’t have Group AI Research. If you’ve poked around the turn files you’ll see quite a bit of AI to AI tech trading going on, with a shocking number of good deals – none of which you’ll get as a human player. The AI even trades colonization and occasionally military tech. This is frustrating for me, even if you swallow hard and accept 3 for 1 trades with all the AIs.

As Folkenwolfe has said, no tech trading makes you select which techs more carefully and you have to balance weapons vs diplomacy vs influence vs development. All are valuable, and in some cases you just cannot let yourself fall behind. You can’t just call up a friendly AI, trade or buy an economic tech (for instance), and then charge ahead.

There are other less obvious implications. First, alliance victories are vary hard to come by since the AI rarely in my games bothers to research that part of the tech tree. In many games I’ve only seen a few races such as the Terran go up to Alliances or beyond. With tech trading you get a close relationship, gift them alliance, and you’re good to go. Without tech trading you may be in for a very long – or endless – wait.

Also, many of the standard methods for raising cash in those desperate early years are nixed. You can’t sell all or some of your tech to get by – you’ll have to find other ways to keep your economy limping along (or just make better choices before you get there!). This forces the human player to think differently, which is always a good thing.

It also makes the AI and human player empires have more character. You can see, for instance, who is investing in extreme colonization, weapons, economy, etc – and the benefits each investment brings. Otherwise Group AI Research bootstraps all the AIs roughly along at the same pace until a few pull ahead.

Overall I like no tech trading better. It makes me think and adapt, and nixes what I hate most: Group AI Research. A level playing field is a good thing!

Hydro

P.S. – I’ve only played at Painful levels. Others may have different observations at other levels of difficulty.
Galactic Civilizations III
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Hi!
Only my first DA game was with tech trading on. When I saw that it still enables quite a cheese game play, I turned it off again. Since I don't get such a good trade offers from AIs as they make among themself, is that just another reason the tech trade stays off in my games. But quite often I also feel sorry for that: there are techs that are in some situations absolutely necessary, but many AIs just ignore them.

BR, Iztok
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
[[quote]Interesting , the opposite has been said.

What other settings were you on folkewolfe ?


I'm not a pro, but I play at crippling, medium map, this case 3 AI, Tight Clusters, abundent habitable, common anamolies, normal tech speed. I always play as the Terreans. However, I finally got myself to go evil and it makes things pretty easy.

Like I said before, most of my planets were not very good. PQ12 was the highest with no special tiles. I was foturnate that most of the resourses were close to me.
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
To me I feel that turning tech trading off makes for a longer more challanging game at first, however, once you get established researching than it gets more and more easy as the game progresses, However, I also play with very slow tech speed too.
Reply #6 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
It must be a difficult balance to maintain. When I build planetary improvements in my DL games my social spending slider is set to 80 and military and tech are set to 10 each. When I research, tech is 80 and social and military are 10 each. I research techs that are 5 turns or less unless I need a specific one. Once I hit 5 turns I research the next highest research facility and turn my tech down to 10 during upgrade. Then its back to 80. If I need more mp I research the next higher improvement, and the cycle repeats. When the tech tree is finished (usually about 5 game years on very slow) tech is lowered to permanently to 10 for tech victory since I never enable it. I find that even when I am doing 67% of the research the !@#$ AI still stays ahead. Maybe diabling tech trade would allow me to actually play with tech victory enabled for once?