A new mod enters the ring - Introducing "Close to Home"

[civac2]

If I read it correctly Ramk was proposing bonus research for the side with fewer total techs. That's a terrible idea.

[Ramkhamhaeng]

What exactly do you mean with cannot attack? Should they not be able to move or move to an enemy-occupied tile? I can only imagine that this can get complicated very fast.

No, I do not want erase the movement points
Every unit has a hasMadeAttack-Flag. If set the unit can move but not attack unless multiple attacks/turn are possible.

I know that the KTB display is revealing more information especially in the early turns. It's important to mention that this KTB display is a convenience feature. The way the science and KTB works in the game you can always determine how many people have a technology, which you can research. Now there is a bit of uncertainty in the early turns due to lower numbers and the KTB of 1 single player not increasing the science output. But as soon as we have higher costs and science output this is pretty reliable.


Coming down to the two options:
a) If I understand this correctly then this is the vanilla BtS behaviour. This gives an advantage to higher skilled players or players with more time at their hand, who invest that time into calculating all the KTB via spreadsheets. The only way to get rid of this spreadsheet calculation is either by removing the KTB at all or not displaying the increase by KTB on the science output, which is bad as then techs can get researched at an untimely fashion.

It wouldn't be exactly the BtS behavior.
BTS: If you change your research rate or change the research project, the bonus is already included in every evaluation. This can be used to gain the information for every available tech.

My suggestion: The bonus is only applied in the evaluation between the turns. Here, you could still gain some information but just for one tech/turn. This weakens the KTB side effects. Drawback are the "surprising extra bakers" for the players because the numbers before and after the turn do not match anymore. This is maybe problematic if you do not want finish a tech in a certain turn.

Removing it completely would be the more clean solution.

b) This is interesting and would be the way to go. Can you explain some more what you mean here. Especially with regards to dead end techs.

Like civac2 suspects I want compare the total number of research techs to evaluate a bonus.

Example:
Number of players: 10
Number of known players: 5
Number of techs by me and the other 5 players: 10; 8, 8, 13, 12, 10
New Base Research Modifier: BM = 2%.

Two avoid negative bonus we just lock at more advanced civs. And got
DTSum = (13-10) + (12-10) = 5

The leads to BM * DTSum / NumOfKnownPlayers = 2% * 5 / 5 = 2%

As you can see, dividing with NumOfKnownPlayers is not smart because new contacts could hurt your bonus. Dividing by NumOfAllPlayers would avoid that but reduces the bonus in games with many players. This can be discussed if the modification is not rejected in all forms.

Main effect of this change probably would be that the players try to avoid techs to keep their total number of techs on a low level. E.g. skipping archery and the whole religion techs could be useful.
Moreover the tech leader never gets a bonus.

Instead of the number of techs are other units of measurements thinkable: A weighted count by era or the bakers of each tech are counted.

[civac2]

I don't think incentivizing skipping cheap/leaf techs like Archery, Drama, Literature, some religious techs is a good idea at all.

I would be fine with a system based on total researched beakers. This would buff civs lagging behind (depending on the numbers, of course) because they get their research bonus always not only for some techs. However, you don't want civs who are roughly in the same ball park research-wise as the leader to benefit from this just because the leader has a few hundred beakers more. So it would have to be weighted or only trigger when the distance is big enough.

[RefSteel]

I'd suggest either leaving the Known Tech Bonus as-is or making it available only to civs with Alphabet (at which point it will no longer provide new information).

Ramkhamhaeng's teleportation suggestion is clever, and I think I mostly like it.  I can think of a few ways to abuse such a mechanic (mostly around settlers in neutral territory, mostly extensions of existing tricks, and mostly only buying a turn or two) but I think the problems it solves are worse.

[Tarkeel]

FWIW, I agree with RefSteel.

I do like the KTB display as it is, and while it can give out too much info at times, it doesn't really feel out of place.

[Ramkhamhaeng]

[…] or making it available only to civs with Alphabet (at which point it will no longer provide new information).

This sounds also like a good solution!

Ramkhamhaeng's teleportation suggestion is clever, and I think I mostly like it. I can think of a few ways to abuse such a mechanic (mostly around settlers in neutral territory, mostly extensions of existing tricks, and mostly only buying a turn or two) but I think the problems it solves are worse.

Open question for me is how to handle the teleportation of other player's units. I think its better to disallow attacks only for own units. (Then, the beaming in friendly territory (player to beam decided by player ID) would not lead to enemy units who cannot attack.)

[Mjmd]

As Charriu stated the KTB indicator is meant to just be a convenience feature so people don't have to waste time calculating it. Moving the KTB indicator to alphabet just negates the whole reason it was implemented. Now on a large game like PB59 I could see disabling it or moving it, because its not calculable as easily, but that's a bridge to cross in the future.  

I'm fascinated if people consider teleportation tricks exploits or 'advanced combat'. I was talking to a friend about it and I had always assumed it was just one of those multiplayer things you have to get used to / learn, but his immediate reaction was that it was an exploit. I have no strong opinion either way, but very curious.

[civac2]

There was an incident in Civforum PB89 wchich triggered a discussion about beaming.

Spoiler for that game:

A war chariot was beamed no less than 10 tiles and ended up 2 tiles away from the Great Lighthouse on the diagonal which was promptly razed. Under normal circumstances beaming would not cover such distances but for destination tiles only visible tiles are considered. Not only did this cause a teleport over half the victim's empire it also made the outcome completely unpredictable.

[T-hawk]

One consequence of a modifier based on total researched beakers: it incentivizes binary science, to delay accumulating any beakers until you might get a higher multiplier for lagging. And in a way that would mean lots of micromanagement to do optimally.

If you solve that by ignoring beakers on a tech currently in progress (meaning only finished techs count), then there's an incentive to partially research techs and leave them just short of finished, so they won't yet count against your multiplier for lagging.

I'm not sure that "total beakers invested" can be defined rigorously enough to do what you want for this -- there's a lot of gamey ways to manipulate it.

[Amicalola]

This ktb / research thing feels very much like an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" situation to me. If we do 'fix' it, I like the alphabet suggestion by far the most of those proposed so far. It would give alphabet some value, which would be interesting.