Stealing tech

Iskandar Reza · November 29, 2002, 02:11

Don't know if this has been mentioned before, but it seems that you can steal two techs for the price of one. Say France has got Economics and Military Tradition. You set your research goal to one of the two, maybe Econs, then go steal Econs. You'd get the Econs of course, and your science adviser will pop up and say we learned secrets of Econ from the French. Choose what's the big picture and voila! You can steal the other tech.

Anyway, the point of this post is, why is it so expensive to steal techs? It's almost pointless to do so, unless you take advantage of the bug I mentioned above. How exactly is the cost calculated? I thought the smaller the civ the cheaper, but no. Not necessarily. If only there were those mobile spies or probe teams like in SMAC. Whatever. Yes. The cost. How is it calculated?

Minmaster · November 29, 2002, 02:26

yup i posted long long time ago about double tech steal but nobody seemed to care. it is here http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...threadid=53101

however i can tell u that this is gone in PtW. i guess firaxis eventually found out about this loophole.

well it is expensive, but when u are in the modern era where civs will charge u thousands of gold for tech, it can come in handy. often times when i play diety and need to catch up, i will *cheat* and save before attempting to steal and reload if i get caught.

player1 · November 29, 2002, 05:41

First,

You need to MAXIMIZE potential gain when stealing tech.

That means stealing techs which are owned by only one civ.
Since that means that you would need a lot of money to buy them.

This pays off best in modern age, and this is the better way to get enemy tech then buying.

It could pay sometimes in industrail era too.
(key word: sometimes_

Also failure chance for safe stealing is pretty low, so there is no real need of save/load "cheating".

In medivial and earlier don't bother.
Exept if you need tech badly, you can't buy it form anyone (since you are in war).

Of course, personnaly the biggest probelm in eps. in not tech. stealing.

It's spy planting (fails too often).

P.S.
Cost is calculated purely by counting the "number" of learned techs (plus some modifiers).

Which means that it does have no connection with gp price to buy the tech.

That of course leads to cheap steal in modern age, and pointless steal in ancient age.