Today on game 173, suddenly all open nations got up to 30 techs total, even little 2 person Egypt that had ~5 techs. The closed nations got nothing. Any idea how this happened? Is it an Era thing?
The timing really stank, as I'd just spent a couple of hours as Science minister coordinating a gain of 3 techs (then losing the position to somebody offline). If I'd known, we could have spent the science later and more productively.
You've been visited by the tech fairy.
The tech fairy is a member of a civ that has lots of techs and who has been science minister. They can leave that civ and join other, open, civs to gift techs to the underdeveloped nations.
It's a good way of rebalancing a game where one team is running away with wins, or if you've accidentally left your civ it can mean you don't waste it. Sometimes it can be malicious but it's usually just and attempt to keep everybody interested.
This game mechanic is stupid, unless we're going to also have finance, military, and wonder fairies as well.
Personally I think you should be able to gift people things. Trade technology. This way smaller civilization can potentially make a difference in the game. You shouldn't need to tech fairy.. its so dodgy.
I just decided to exploit this "bug" in my last game. But I used it for a different purpose. ie. In a war against a technologically superior Civilization, you can leave your current civilization go to theirs and then come back with all your troops upgraded. This especially works immediately after Gunpowder is researched as all those various ancient troops all upgrade into one solo unit (Riflemen). Works the same with Combustion (horses into Tanks).
You shouldn't need to "Close Borders" to prevent this. The game developers must address this issue.
Technically you can already do that. People can leave and join under-developed nations with their military units, gold, and great people just as they can with technology.Originally Posted by NickV
Civilizations are not players. Players are not civilizations. This is the core concept of the game, and until you grasp it, nothing will seem right to you.
Please use the quote mechanism, as it's otherwise impossible to understand this random diatribe.
Actually, there are players, and city-states, and nation-states. The problem here is that nation-states automatically inherit the technology attributes of city-states as players hop between them, but city-states require a player to become minister to inherit them from nation-states. Unbalanced mechanism.
In fact that is just what happened here! Someone, and I won't name names, decided the game needed more balance to be interesting. This is not a "game mechanic" just a player who wanted to make the game more competitive. Shame it didn't work...
I've done it many times... usually because there's an imbalance. Don't want your plan disrupted? Close your borders. Don't want someone stealing your tech? Close your borders. Pretty simple really.
I understand the need to re-balance a game to make it more interesting but it shouldn't be up to one or two players gifting science or whatever to other civs. That only shows, as you mentioned before, that the game is imbalanced on it's core and something should be done about it.
Actually this can introduce an element of "social espionage". Or social gaming + espionage. Can i trademark that?
Civs may have spies...members who join just to become science minister, then steal the tech back to their civ. I think that could be fun
Yes, I've done that, too.I think that could be fun
Say I have 5 friends, we all sign up on other civs and research different tech. We all aim to be science ministers. At some point we leave our civs and group up to gain a complete set of tech for everything.
Does this work? Would it be unbalancing?
It would work to a point, but there are choke points in the tree. Still, I'd be completely sanguine about it, as you'd actually become science ministers.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote