Strange tech cost scaling

[Ande]

I started up a small random map in ATG with only 2 players total and recieved 5 cities plus the capital totaling 60k productionpoints per turn. I noticed that Infantry II upgrade costs 166pp and I though that to be a bit steep considering I'm not playing with costly research selected. The ratio of ratio of research cost to thousands of production is 2.6.

I loaded up another small scenario with 3 controlled cities and a capital providing 44k production. This time the Infantry II research costs 75pp and this resluts in a ratio of research cost to thousands of production to of 1.7

To make really sure of the apparent trend, I started a xlarge scenario with two players and started with 284k production and the infantry upgrade costs 865 which results in the ratio of 3.

The consequence is that upgrades simply becomes less attractive in larger games.

[Josh]

Holy smoke that sounds like a serious bug... 865 PP's to upgrade to InfII!
Guess it'll be patched in the next patchrelease.

[zukhov]

Yup, I'm seeing the same high upgrade costs.  Debug info: Random, X-Large Map, 1 human versus 1 standard AI.  Remarked few bugs in this game and excellent support.  Very pleased with Vics great support.

[Vic]

hi guys,

it seems to work as intended to me.

in random 2 player games the total (including mines and oil) production power on the map is divided by 125.000 (rulevar 464) to give the research cost modifier.

and yes infantry II is very expensive, more then most other fields. it is because so many sf types can get upgrades from this research fields... rifle, smg, militia, paratrooper, etc..

if you think research is to expensive you might want to increase the size of rulevar 464 to a higher ammount. say 250.000 to half the cost.

best,
Vic

[springer]

I'm in agreement with Vic's rationale of upping the price of infantry.  Not only does an infantry upgrade affect the greatest percentage of units, the greatest SFT types on the map, some of the simulations I ran point toward upgrades as having a fairly substantial, though indirect impact, on the effectiveness of infantry that is greater than the 25% increments of the upgrades would suggest because the dynamics of how infantry interact with their support weapons changes in interesting ways as the infantry acquires more hit points. (Essentially, stronger infantry will hold the front line longer, allowing the rear support weapons more rounds to do more damage. Thus, the real gain is actually greater than it appears to be. The new costs reflect this, I feel.  

The higher price also adds more balance in another way.  It forces players to more seriously consider higher tech options than "grunt" improvement in upgrades (i.e., planes or armor) in a game where there is a huge temptation to stay at a low-fuel-consuming WWI mode (especially when oil wells are scarce).

[Ande]

My concern was not about cost of infantry specifically. I used it as an example because it is one of the pricier techs that is very desired. I thought I saw a trend where the cost for tech was scaled faster than production which would make techs increasingly worse as the map size becomes larger. But when I did some further testing I saw no such trend, apparently I got huge amount of resource sites before that drove up the research cost.

My suggestion would be to not count resource production against research cost as it does not, in any way, provides the means to produce the pps needed. This way reserach cost is allways proportionate to your ability to pay for it.

[Jeffrey H.]

Interesting idea, removing resource production from the "base" for research cost scaling. I can imagine this being an offset for a regime with poor resource allocation in random mode. Assuming of course that resource allocation is truly random and not balanced out. I don't know which it is currently.