[eBug] AI and Technology Trade Points?

I was wondering the samn thing, probable their total tech points that they have researched. It should be hidden from players anyway, so it wouldnt cause panic through out the realm. What difficulty are you playing? The higher levels the more points they will get.

Some people have reported that the AI is indeed getting way more tech trade points than they should be, it's probably a bug.

Thanks, folks, for answering and confirming.

@Redindus: I was on Challenging.  That's supposed to add no economic or resource bonuses to the AI as far as I can tell.

I think I'll change the category on this post

Same thing here. I'm playing on easy and have been dominating the game.

I haven't specialized on research much, but I have some research traits and built the basic research building.

I have expanded more quickly than the AI and have 5x the points of the second largest.

Also the research graph (when retiring) shows that I always had significantly more research than any AI player.

Still one of the empires I just conquered had already built two of the "towers" and I just fought another one which already had "ancient xxx demons" and high grade enchanted weapons. I'm barely past researching archers and that is my most advanced tech tree. Catching up on those techs would take some 200 turns - and I'm now generating about 5x the research points that anybody else does.

Now I checked on the other empires in the diplomacy screen. The "worst" has roughly the same overall research points (as shown on the trade screen) which is roughly 800. The best has a total of something like 15000. No idea what these numbers really stand for.

I also went shopping with this guy and his shop sells "champions" plate armor and other pretty high end stuff. He has 2 cities and as far as I know never had more.

What I do realize is that he was a direct neighbour to the other highly advanced faction that I just wiped out. This faction had done some (minor) tech trades with me (about 20-30 points each). I wonder if the tech trading between AI factions is somehow broken. I could imagine two AI factions just trading tech points over and over again, thus creating tech from "thin air".

EDIT: Not even sure if the tech trading issue would even be a bug or rather a loophole. It's my first game, so I'm not to firm with this. It seems to me that you are not trading individual techs, but just "research" points. I don't really understand what determines the number of points that you can trade. Unless this is somehow limited, so you can not trade the same "knowledge" over and over again, this could actually allow for the above. You don't see this issue, if you are only able to trade individual techs, like in other 4x games.

there is definitely something wrong there.

there's a couple places where you set difficulty.  is it possible that you set the world difficulty to Challenging but that the AIs are set to Expert or Insane difficulty?

otherwise I'd say it's a bug, and upload the save.

@cselmes

there's the possibility that the AI has been trading tech between each other.  are you playing against vanilla factions or ones you custom built yourself.  I did just finish a game where a custom faction was pumping out catapults way ahead of when I would think it possible.  And they didn't really seem that advance otherwise.  It seems like there might be a bug that allow the AI to bypass some requirements when placing things into the queue.

I tried a game vvith Expert/Expert difficulty. Season 72, a faction bragged up hovv they had Cooperation. Looking up Cooperation, it vvould take me another 173 seasons to unlock, if I didn't research anything else. I had taken the "Scholars" perk for a research boost, and vvas playing "Epic" research speeds... Foreign relations said they had 1640 research, vvhile I did 2.6 research/season.. times 72 seasons for around 200ish? I can't find my ovvm research anyvvhere.

Apparently, anything after "Challenging" AI factions has economic buffs, but that seems a bit much. I vvas attacked later by an enemy sovereign vvho vvas level 19... I vvas level 10. The sovereign, vvith a bear, vviped out my sovereign and four top-tech units in hand-to-hand combat. So, I'm playing Challenging AIs again... lol

I go back to a comment I made on another post about tech-brokering... In GalCiv it seems the AI would go wild trading techs with each other, and re-trading them and re-trading them... and it tipped the scales enormously against the human player.  I like the fact that you can't trade "techs" in this game, but I do suspect that the AI is either garnering more tech points per research, or just wildly outpacing the player in the tech-point trading department.

Based on their land holdings, there is no way that Kraxis (in my example) could have had the points they had (or any other of my close neighbors, for that matter).  I think the AI is obviously getting a boost of some kind, and that's fine, except not when the difficulty level claims that they aren't.

All of this definitely sounds broken to me.

@sweatyboatman

EDIT2: Checked again - I was wrong the one with the insane numbers is actually a custom faction. The one I had beaten before which also seemed to have very high tech (city militia with boreal blade?) was vanilla (oracle ceresa).

I don't think it was a queue issue.

One of them was a kingdom player that I was neutral with. When I opened the diplomacy screen they had insane numbers in the tech trading section (some 15000+ in total, compared to ~700 on my side) and when I entered their territory with my hero and opened the shop, I could buy high end stuff that would have taken me a few hundred turns to research (and my research rate had been higher throughout the game and at that point was about 5x theirs, according to the graph when I retired the game). So I don't know where they should have that amount of research points from.

It was on easy difficulty, so it should definetely not be caused by AI bonuses or anything like that. I personally don't see any legit way how the AI could have gotten to those research levels, so I think there is a bug somewhere.

As I said my best guess is the technology trading, as that could also explain why we don't always see it - just when two factions "like" each other enough and are both keen on technology trading (no idea if there is any preferences like that) - so they do it repeatedly over a longer period. 

I haven't yet figured out exactly how tech trading works, but it seems to me that I can only trade the amount of those techs that the other party hasn't researched yet (or something like that).

However if this restriction is not properly applied to the AI, they could just trade all their research points. And they might be able to do this over and over again (with ever higher numbers since the points from previous trades could also be added in). You'd get some exponential growth that could lead to numbers like that.

But again that's just a guess.

EDIT: If there is no such restriction as above, there definetely needs to be one. Otherwise factions could just as well stop researching and keep trading tech points to advance the tech tree.

EDIT3: Some details of the game

Season is 319

On the tech trading screen I see tech values:

Mine:

Civ 216

War 117

Magic 201

AI:

Civ 1942

War 1998

Magic 13068

Their shop sells

Boreal Blades (takes me 200+ turns to research the necessary tech)

Champions Cuirass (another 130+ on top of that)

My current rate of research 59.8 with 12 cities.

Theirs is (estimate from the research graph in retire screen) below 10 and most of the game has been more like below 5 with 2 cities (don't think they ever had more).

EDIT5: Another thing that came to my mind and might be a factor - I was playing with many (9) AI factions, so there could have been more than average tech trading going on. However even if I add up all the research of all AI factions that would not be enough to get those tech levels (9 x 5 (on average, actually rather less than that) x 319 = 14355).

This approximately turn 200?  I had 6 cities, lost two to the AI within the last five turns.  They were fielding 7-man units to my 3-man units.  Below is a screen of my ally... I had just traded off all of my 200 tech points to another faction.  He's got plenty to spare!  With one city!

This is on "challenging"... no AI bonuses.

Stardock, can we please fix this problem?

I'm wondering if this is caused by the insta-build bug...

https://forums.elementalgame.com/437577/

@rlane48 LOL!  Holy crap!  That's turn 200?  You are screwed! 

I have never seen numbers like that.  But I have never played a game with 16+ opponents.  Even then I am not sure that tech-trading is sufficient to explain those numbers.

And I definitely don't believe it's related to the difficulty level, at all.

May I ask, how often do you save and reload the game?  I don't mean necessarily save-scumming, but just like "OK.  I am done for now.  Save."  And then come back to the game later?

Also, do you load from Autosaves or Quicksaves or manually named saves?

I strongly suspect that this is the same as the "AI builds everything in the queue after load" bug.  That's a seemingly random affair, it doesn't happen every time, but it does happen.  I think it's also instantly finishing whatever research was queued (including chained research!).  So if the AI sets its sights on a tech way down the research tree, it will occasionally complete that tech and all the dependent techs on the next load.

That, along with rampant tech trading, seems the most plausible explanation for those tech numbers on turn 200.

@sweatyboatman  Ha ha, right?!?!  It kind of kills the game for me when I try to put everyone on a fairly even keel.  Sovs have their respective race/sov bonuses, and have to fight the world -- what adds variance (or is supposed to) are those bonuses, your starting position, and any luck you may have scooping up parts of the world.  Then I see this, and honestly it ruins the game for me.

I don't save-scum, but I did save a couple times to take a break last night.  So maybe over the course of these 200 turns I reloaded three or four times, including my load this morning.  These are all manual save reloads.  Does it make a difference what kind of save you are loading from?

Nobody knows.  I am just trying to get as much info out there about this bug as possible.  I am pretty sure I had this problem loading from a Quicksave and a manual saves.  It occurs to me that Autosaves might be safe because they're made before your turn starts. 

Though it probably doesn't matter at all.

You have mods enabled, I assume?  What mods are you running?

The only mods I'm running right now are GinsuKnives, and LargerMaps.  This has me intrigued.  I think I'll have to do a playtest with the different saves to see if there's any difference.

[edit]  I also modded blood types to add population costs to them.  I did, however, experience this issue prior to that mod.

Nope, no difference that I can see, and it happens intermittently as well.  I'm sure that doesn't help much in finding a solution.

Has this been fixed yet?  My current game, which is the newest patch, has all the AI with 15,000 or 20,000 in civics research and hundreds in the others.

as far as I can tell this is not fixed

AI get insane amount of research on every difficulty level.

There is even experiment by Tuidjy to prove it - https://forums.elementalgame.com/437783