Its Lonely (Boring) at the Top

[Grim Legacy]

Originally posted by Akka le Vil


No.
Actually, it just means nothing to improve the science rate once you are at 4 turns for a tech. WIth a curve, it would still accelerate the research, just not as much. The situation would be different. I know that there is times I just want to get a tech, no matter how much it cost to me.

What you are forgetting here is the quite large grid that research is laid upon: game turns. You only benefit if your science spending is increased so much that it amounts to a full turn benefit. Now, especially on say a 4turn situation with 70% science, a exponential cost of research would mean that an increase to 100% science is not likely to yield a turn benefit. So in effect, the situation would remain much the same. I'm not saying it is exactly the same, or that I don't prefer the idea over a fantasy-less cap, but it would be very similar in terms of gameplay.

[Grim Legacy]

Originally posted by Moraelin
...

It also becomes a lot easier in the late game, so it doesn't really reduce the boredom when you're at the top. I mean, ok, in the early game just moving around is a problem. But once I have 100+ workers and railroads everywhere, I just have some tanks fortified somewhere and can quickly move them to intercept those stacks of archers before they get anywhere NEAR my cities. E.g., in that Normandy style invasion, even though I had like 5 stacks of a dozen units each converging on one city, none of them actually got anywhere near that city. I didn't even use tanks, I brought a dozen Cossacs that I still had from a previous war. Zero turns to move them by rail, and they made mincemeat out of the warriors and spearmen and bowmen that the AI was sending.

Well ok, the game is beatable. That's hardly a flaw is it? What more than a massive attack can the AI produce. On a single unit-scale the human will always move more intelligently (at least in Civ3 lol).

Also, what difficulty level/map settings are you playing at?

[Moraelin]

Well, I don't doubt that in the end there will always be the abrupt limit of turns. Still, even that can be softened a bit. Like for example, if I only need, say, 50 more science spending for a discovery, and I produced 100 in this turn, let half of the surplus accumulate towards the next one. (So on my next discovery, I start with (100-50)/2=25, instead of from zero.)This would make it somewhat less abrupt in that aspect, too. More science going from 70% to 100% may not drop the current discovery from 4 to 3 turns, but might help reduce the next one from 5 to 4. Or might not.

But in the end, there'll always be some limitations, one way or another. I'm not naive enough to believe that a 100% percent perfect system is even possible. In the end I'd just want those limitations to be less obvious and/or easier to swallow than an abrupt cap.