According to the Official Strategy Guide, I have a 2% chance per captured factory to steal a tech, but I think there's another factor involved. In the very late game, the "one tech per 50 factories" rule of thumb seems to fall apart. For example, in my current game I invaded Meklon and captured >500 factories, but only picked up one tech (six techs are still showing up as white on the report screen; there may be more that aren't visible in the limited windows). I've seen similar behavior in the past when the total number of techs is very large.
Note: I'm playing 1oom instead of the original game, but my understanding is that the code is very similar or identical.
That's extraordinary, and I haven't heard of that (nor encountered it to my knowledge) before. I suppose it could happen by pure chance - less than one chance in 2,000 (i.e. less than 0.05%) if I'm calculating correctly, but stranger things have happened - but it sounds like this is something that has come up a lot more often than that. Is it always a case of getting just one or two techs when you should be getting more?
I know you can never get more than six techs from the same planet on the same turn, even with several hundred factories, and there are some planetology techs which Silicoids in particular can never get by any means, but other than that, I wasn't aware of any weirdness with large numbers of factories captured. I haven't played nearly as much 1oom as MoO, but I agree it seems unlikely it introduced a new bug....
My recollection is that it's a late game phenomenon, where both my race and the target race have a lot of techs, and a relatively small percentage can be stolen. I've read about other cases where the game rolls a certain number of times for a result and then gives up, maybe that's what's happening here?
I.e. tech stolen. Roll for tech, it's invalid (already known). Repeat until kicked out of loop.
(June 18th, 2021, 19:23)DaveV Wrote: My recollection is that it's a late game phenomenon, where both my race and the target race have a lot of techs, and a relatively small percentage can be stolen. I've read about other cases where the game rolls a certain number of times for a result and then gives up, maybe that's what's happening here?
I.e. tech stolen. Roll for tech, it's invalid (already known). Repeat until kicked out of loop.
Oh - yeah, that makes a lot of sense, based both on the way the game handles other things and on my vague recollection of how it actually selects tech acquisition. Good catch! (My own games rarely go late enough for an effect like this to come into play, which would help explain why I haven't noticed it.)
First post. I played MOO1 back when it came out. Still have my old Manual. Rebooted a few years ago via GOG, no patch.
Played hundreds of games.
IMO, there is a randomness to the tech capture. I have seen 1 factory yield a tech and a few hundred yield 0 or 1. This game sometimes generates crazy results that defies the law of averages. In tech capture and other areas. I don't over think this, I just accept it and move on. I try not to over think this. I don't have the computer skill to break down the internal nuts and bolts of the program. So I just accept it as the "fog of war", and move on.
It's part of the character of this classic game.
There's definitely a lot of randomness to tech capture, yeah - getting a tech from just one factory is really lucky, but I'm not surprised to see it happen if you invade enough over hundreds of games! (I'm also not surprised at crazy results that defy the law of averages; making predictions about anything on the basis of that fallacious "law" is usually a mistake!) I really like the random elements in MoO that allow you on the one hand to improve your odds by committing to a plan heavily (sometimes to the point of certainty, as when pushing tech to 100% - "50%" in the base game) but on the other hand never let you get complacent: You always have to adapt your plans to the low-probability outcomes that nearly always crop up somewhere important with so much going on in a game!
For me, it's also fun to know where some of the weirder results are coming from when certain circumstances make them actually common, like what DaveV was describing for late-game invasions. Even if it never comes up in any of my playthroughs, I like learning the details of how the game does things!
Concerning unseen techs. Not from the low tech list. I have several times gotten a top tech from an invasion that was not on the current spy report. Guessing it just popped and it was my good fortune to be invading that turn. There is some crazy luck in this game. Sometimes it helps you and sometimes it hurts you.
If your opponent gets a key ground tech at this time. It could ruin a well planned super important invasion also.
Yeah, I've definitely seen those too! Most memorably, in our Bearperor Returns succession game, the Alkari picked up three different high-level ground combat techs in seven years while the team was preparing an invasion. I don't remember exactly what they had before that, but it might have been a jump of as much as +125 almost all at once! Lots of challenges in that one, of all kinds and at different times. It was a very fun game.
