[Freeciv-Dev] Re: cheating

[Greg Wooledge <greg@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jed Davis (jldavis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:

> I think some of the newer paycivs (CtP?) have
> varying science "costs" for advances, for what it's worth.

That's true; CTP has variable costs depending on the advance.  Civ1,
Civ2 and SMAC do not.  I don't know about CTP2 yet, but I'd bet it does.

IMHO, the CTP way makes the most sense.  The goal is to make the later
advances harder to attain, because by the time you're working on them,
you have a much higher science output.  But the way Freeciv (and Civ1,
etc.)  do it has the undesirable side effect that any given advance is
"magically" harder to learn if you already know more things.  This is
rather hard to justify; if anything, a wider base of knowledge should
make new learning *easier*, not harder.  With the CTP method, you could
make Writing take, say, 40 lightbulbs -- and this is how many you'd need,
regardless of whether you already know Pottery and Ceremonial Burial.

(Truth be told, I'm not sure whether CTP's advances require a fixed
number of light bulbs, or whether the requisite number is derived by some
formula that involves your current state of knowledge together with a
"difficulty factor" for each advance.)

-- 
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