(December 16th, 2013, 16:34)Krill Wrote: TBH I'm unsure of the effect for making Agri and Hunting cheap; I think that on certain settings you still have to start with one of them because otherwise you can't reach AH in time to hook the food res, so there is still that distorting effect on the tech valuation.
One thing I was considering was changing map size's impact on tech costs to affect later techs more than earlier ones. i.e. on a large map, instead of multiplying tech costs by 1.4 across the board, multiply cheap techs by 1, future tech by 1.8, and techs in between by an interpolated value. The geometric mean of future tech cost and hunting cost is approximately the cost of paper - that being 1.4 seems about reasonable, right?
My interpretation of the intent of the increased tech costs on a large map is that they assume you'll own more land by the end of the game, so tech costs need to be higher. But at the start of the game you still get the same number of settlers, so it seems kind of silly to make techs so much more expensive than on a small map.