(March 13th, 2014, 15:03)SevenSpirits Wrote: What would you guys think of the following change to the tech cost calculation? The goal here is threefold: 1) Increase later-game tech costs, and do it smoothly. 2) Decrease ancient tech costs a little bit to lessen importance of starting techs 3) Make different world sizes have a more useful effect on tech cost - currently, large world sizes increase the cost of all techs with the justification that players will have more land and thus cap out at a higher tech rate, but having more land doesn't help you with ancient and classical techs.
X is a percent bonus based on world size: 0% for duel up to 50% for huge. Current tech cost modification according to world size is simple: Cost gets multiplied by 1 + X. My proposal is to multiply cost by (1 + the following) instead:
((log(cost of tech) / log (40) - 1) * (1.2X + 0.3)
What does that do? The quick summary is it means the map size multiplier doesn't apply at all to the cheapest techs, applies about as usual to medium-cost techs like paper, and applies by a greater factor to expensive techs.
The first term, ((log(cost of tech) / log (40) - 1), is a number between 0 and 1.5 depending on how far down the tech tree we are. 40-cost techs are 0. Future tech is 1.5 (well, a tiny bit less, but close enough). Paper is approximately in the middle with 0.73. (We are caring about the geometric/multiplicative mean here, not the arithmetic mean. I don't consider advanced flight to be an average-cost tech because it costs half as much as future tech.) The second term, (1.2X + 0.3), is a number between 0.3 and 0.9 depending on the map size.
Multiply these two terms together and you get 0 for a super cheap tech, a number like 20-60% for a tech like paper (depending on map size), and a number like 45-135% for the top end stuff (future tech), depending on map size. Remember this is replacing a number that ranged from 0-50%.
Here's a link to a spreadsheet showing tech costs for variable world size / handicap / etc, compared to how they would look under this formula. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?...sp=sharing
You should be able to make a copy of it so you can try out different variables.
Looking at this in more detail, it seems that the cross over point is at Maths on Standard size map, and around about Alphabet on Huge, in other words at the start of the classical era. Stuff like Construction, Calendar, CoL will always be more expensive. Looking at the cost of the Ancient era techs I don't think that the savings on the entire era cover the increased cost of a single late Classical tech.
Is this intentional? Basically, I'm trying to understand the reasoning for the slope of the increase in tech costs and why the "crossover" is where it is.