and as a usually peaceful player I like this aspect of ages, but it does seem to limit strategies.

I guess it makes sense for a balancing approach. Personally, I always focused on exploration, colonization and infrastructure first. Colonize as much as I could in my immediate vicinity, while researching techs meant to enhance the economy and research. By the time the colony rush was winding down, I would have carved out a decent-sized empire and have one of (if not the best) economies and research ranks in the game. So while the AI focused on the military and beating the snot out of each other, they start running out of money and can't afford to build up their captured colonies. So I'm more easily able to catch up with them militarily because I have a massive surplus of credits and good research, while their empires are going into an economic death-spiral for expanding way too fast and focusing on only the military. 

Well, I dunno what the new tech tree looks like but I think one of the things that was missing in the GC2 tech trees was a way to prevent a player (human or AI) from going too far down the wrong road.  For example, huge hulls are not going to do you a lot of good if you haven't got weapons to fit into them, and you're not going to be able to crank them out fast enough until you have some serious industrial output going.

With the techs divided across ages, all strategies become possible eventually.  For example, if you're intent on letting your enemies build research infrastructure so that you can swoop in and nab it with your transports, you can do that as soon as you have transports.

The catch is that your opponents have a similar technology situation to you and, assuming roughly equal progress through the tech tree, they're also going to building transports and military ships.

It's not much of a challenge to steamroll alien colonies that can't put up a fight, is all I'm saying.

OMG I'm freaking out now. I can't become uber rich as a strategy as fast as before. I can't do things on my terms, and even if there is only a small difference than before i shouldn't have to compromise my play style for a minority of inexperienced gun runners.

^That was what I didn't like, it goes beyond mere weapons. To use arbitrary caps on progression is pointless considering to play the game adequately you need a bit of everything anyway to have a functional empire that can grow, and it all happened organically.

I am looking at the tree now and I can't see how this helps. Cost of weapons or any other technology becomes to great to realistically research vs other civs stopping for a colonization tech to keep up with the increase.

You can't go straight for Nightmare Torpedoes regardless of tech restrictions, so why have them? They are irritating and a impediment to someone's preferred strategy or a potentially dangerous disadvantage in a troublesome situation.

Again, I am looking at the tree trying to map it out and find a way most players benefit realistically, and all I see is a light but irritating restriction in specialization and there for, fun.

(I'm proud at how fast I wrote this )

DARCA

I think it brings back the civil to Galactic Civilization. It makes sense that a civilization at it's core would round out itself in many different fields of research before advancing to the next age. I don't necessarily enjoy the method to which they implement this, but it is a good first attempt at allowing a civilization come to a revelation.

I view this age requirement as a loosely based tree on certain techs. It's better than making hard requirements of all trees where it effectively forces the player to choose several different initial techs in order to research later techs. This gives players more flexibility than a hard-line approach where you have to research X from Colonization, Y from Warfare, Z from Engineering before you may research any techs after this point on the tree. It basically puts it as you need several of these types of techs before advancing to more advanced techs.

I do not see a huge amount of lag time, but I tend to do a rounded approach to research in most games.

For the love of god, just let me be able to MODD this out!!!!!

I swear its like the time I was convinced to go to Las Vegas and after ONE night I woke up with a ring on my finger and a woman next to me with huge hangover. So let this be easier to fix! Jk.

DARCA.

Of all the arguments in the thread, this is the one that brought it home for me.  In GC 2, I like to play the AI at harder difficulties.  That often means that I am behind several other races in research in the early game, and usually fighting for my "life" (which is where the fun is).  My solution was to "bee line" for certain techs to keep me competitive.

As I often do when evaluating a new game, I look to how other games solve a game mechanic.  Civilization 5 doesn't limit by age how techs are researched.  More advanced techs simply cost more and, thus, take longer to research.  The route to certain technologies relies on several other techs, which eventually forces the player to research more of them to continue to advance.  It's how the tree is balanced that makes it work so well.  Also, entering a new age often brings rewards (even if some are only graphical).  I personally enjoy the Civ 5 tech tree mechanism and don't feel stifled at all.

Compare that to an RTS game like Age of Empires II.  Defined tech ages.  You have to meet requirements before you can advance to a new age and get access to better techs.  This works very well in an RTS game to control pacing.  But I tend to agree with others that in a turn-based game, maybe not so much.

I think the approach Civ 5 takes would work very well in GC 3.

Um, you all seem to forget that an AI has to be able to play the game too.

One of the criticisms I have about GC2 is that the AI (no offence intended Brad) mostly putzed about, never really taking advantage of a good start.

They basically eat up the galactic real estate and resources while you're trying to pull off a balancing act with economy, research and expansion.  The rest of the game you're trying to wrest it from their control.

And well, holy mentats, Batman, they came up with some crazy approaches to competing with the humans.

AI 8?  Build ships.  Build moooore ships.  Never mind that they only have 8HP base, just build lots of X302s and watch them explode gloriously.  Like, honestly, I would start this AI out with battlecruiser hulls and nothing else just to shut it up.

I tried to rein AI 8 in a bit with my mod because of the ship spam.  Which is what it is, spam.  It's a hopeless tactic which gives the AI a false sense of superiority, because when I do get into a war with AI 8, those X302s are going to be dusted so fast you won't even have a chance to say 'Indeed.'

Ships cost maintenance.  If you're not using them, they're slowing your economy down, and don't even get me started on how the AI ran its economy into the ground in GC2.  Repeatedly.

If the AI needs ages so that it can do the appropriate stuff at the appropriate time, then maybe they're not such a bad idea.

Remember, this is an alpha.  Figuring out if something works is more important than figuring out if strategy X is going to work when the game is released.  Like, it's still an alpha, so nothing is set in stone.  Maybe a better way to rein in the AI's self-destructive tendencies will emerge.  Don't get hung up on details like not being able to beeline.

Besides, one of the drawbacks of being able to beeline is that it produces predictable games where either the player makes it to that tech, or they don't.

Quoting Achronous,

reply 3

I agree, but by the time you start building decent warships to go to war, you will probably already have researched Planetary invasion. Perhaps it's too stop early game rushing. Sort of a balancing issue. Just hope the Drengin don't start the game with it already researched

A-men to that.

Another vote against the ages here and for finding another mechanism. There is an opportunity cost to researching any technology -- if I focus on industry, I can't research as fast. If I focus on military, then I'm going to have slower domestic and trade development. That's all part of the calculus of the game.

I agree that going way out of balance is also undesirable and like the suggestion that proceeding too far down a particular track without researching other technologies should become exponentially more difficult because the groundwork isn't there. Making these up, but try discovering a diplomatic technology of "secure encryption" without first having discovered "computers" -- you'd effectively need to invent computers in order to complete the encryption tech, which would explain why it takes much much longer than if the civilization was a little more well rounded. Game mechanics-wise, this COULD be done with dependencies, but you'd end up with a huge plate of spaghetti in your tech tree which would be worse.

Thinking it through -- what if research costs were influenced by a ratio of (base tech cost/total accumulated research points to date)? So I'm trying to research "Planetary Invasion" at a base cost of (again making it up) 1,000 research points. In Game A I work up to it, developing a well rounded civilization with total researched techs totaling 15,000 research points. The research cost modifier for Planetary Invasion is 1,000/15,000 or 6.66% so MY research cost for PI is 1,000 * 1.066 = 1,066. Around this time I'm churning out about 100 research points a turn so I get there in about 10 turns. Pretty reasonable.

Now, in Game B I beeline for Planetary Invasion, ignoring everything except the pre-requisites. I manage to get there with a handful of military techs researched totaling 2,500. Now my research cost modifier is 1,000/2,500 or 40%, making Planetary Invasion cost 1,400 research points. I didn't do any research techs, so I'm only turning in 30 research points a turn, so it will take me 46 turns to research Planetary Invasion. Adequately obstructive.

Every race starts out with some base technologies, so we don't need to worry about a divide by zero error -- just to be safe from modders it's best to capture a zero point situation and cap the modifier at 200% (or somewhere north of that) of base cost.

A way around this would be to trigger the age change for every race simultaneously : when one race begins research on an age of war tech, every other race may reasearch age of war techs.

Brainy civs would heve to take their time, getting techs all around before moving to the juicy ones, and brawny civs could beeline to stay competitve in one area.