Currently, tech allies work by giving 10% of whatever you tech to your allies (limited to 10% of their current tech points). Example of how it currently works:

I have 1000 TPT.
My 3 allies have 500, 1000 and 5000 TPT.
If my 3 allies each tech one turn, I gain 50 tech, 100 tech and 500 tech respectively.
Similarly, if I tech one turn, each of my allies also gain 100, 100 and 100 tech respectively.

[Edit: The above assumes that each person in the tech ring has at least 10x as much tech as would be gained from tech allies.]

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I propose to change this to be reversed: Whenever I spend a turn to tech, none of my tech allies gain tech. Instead, I gain 10% of my allies TPT (limited to 10% of my TPT).

Example:
I have 1000 TPT.
My 3 allies have 500, 1000 and 5000 TPT.
If my 3 allies tech one turn each, they each gain an additional 50, 100 and 100 tech from being allied to me respectively.
Similarly, if I tech one turn, I gain 50, 100 and 100 bonus tech respectively.

What this solves is tech leeching.

The player receiving the tech has to spend his turns teching. If all 4 players tech all their turns, then the amount of tech generated for each player isn't changed much at all.

In terms of how this is displayed in game, your effective TPT (after adding in TPT from tech allies) is displayed in the Research screen to be used per turn spent.


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Edit: Bigben has suggested an even better way (and much easier to implement) later in this thread. He is now quoted here:



I have talked to Pang about this suggestion that BigBen has put forward, and he said he likes it a lot.

that would stop leeching....

do we want to do that though is the question.... :-/

This is actually pretty good.

love it!!!!

I think you have how it currently works somewhat wrong, but nevertheless, I love this idea. You have to tech to get the tech points. Frankly, I don't want to play against a leecher.

You are correct, I got it wrong, its based on 10% of their current tech points, not 10% of their TPT.

It's just that when you bulk tech more than 1 turn, the total amount gifted to your allies is checked against 10% of their current tech, so if your tech allies have low tech points, you should tech turn by turn for maximum benefit.

That's still wrong, actually.

Well, yeah, I don't know the exact specifics, but its probably close enough Slagpit. I've edited the original post.

Slagpit, what's wrong with it?

Regardless, this is an excellent idea.

Interesting. Not sure if its 'better' or not.. but I still don't think its necessary to penalize leechers since some people agree to that type of setup.

It's not that we want to penalize leechers, but more to prevent abuse. 3 techers each providing leech to one country is effectively giving that one country an additional 30% additional income (10% per ally).

If you are suggesting 30% extra income is not game unbalancing, particularly for the solo servers, then I don't know what is. A 20m Express finish becomes 26m with tech leechers.

I don't want to lose because somebody agreed to give a guy free tech. That makes it an unequal playing field and it's a sizable advantage. edit: Yeah. Like Xinhua said. And it's more than that because the leecher will have a leg up on everyone else all round which has a lot of repercussions.

yeah, personally i never have leeches/become a leech and once I stop teching I really encourage my allies to drop me; however, since I am usually the biggest techer of the bunch sometimes they keep me as a leech for a few days until they find a new ally (or to pay the debt).

This would stop that practice and make sure that tech allies are only used by techers or people in desperate need of FA (to pay reps).

Tech leeches isn't a fair way of play, specially in solo servers.

FA can only be used once every 22 hours and is easy to track (kind of).
Buyouts can go horribly wrong.
Tech leeches are the safes way of helping a friend to get top 10.

I like it, because it rewards you for teching more instead of rewarding your allies.

I have a better idea...

Research allies giving you 10% of their tech% as a bonus to your tech%;

So that if you had say a farmer with 200% agri tech, and he had 3 farmer allies each with 200%, then that could push his tech to up by 3*20% or to 260%; perhaps modulated by tech points in some way so you can't have a 1A country as a research ally.

Though that might be overpowered, but I'm sure we could adjust downwards as necessary.


Also would mean (assuming we used the allies's tech%) that the best research allies would be demos... if we didn't then it'd be ally-govt agnostic of course...



Anyway, an idea.

Overpowered O.o

strongest alliance in the game :D

This would make tech really strong at the onset and pretty much dead towards the end.

I think it would also disproportionately affect cashers.

qzjul's, your idea is also a decent suggestion, however, that has 2 major side effects that you might have not forseen:

A) Tech allies becomes required for everyone in the game, much like D allies, thus techers will actually generate 30% less overall tech server-wide. This will cause tech prices to increase, but this will be offset by the amount of "tech shared by allies", which is tweakable. It's a bit mathy to balance it out. We don't actually want to do this because:

B) Your suggested change directly nerfs the techers, and buffs every other strategy. Since techers produce 30% less tech, unless the price of tech increases by 30%, it is a nerf to them. Likewise, every other strategy type will gain tech allies and need to buy even less tech (adjusted by price increase) to achieve the same % levels for their production type, non-techer strats become stronger relatively.


The side effects of the meta game would cause less players to be techers, and play other strats. This directly causes potential problems on small population servers such as Express and Tournament. (I could be wrong here, and more people play techers instead because of the perceived increase in tech price - but that weakens the techer strat even more if more people play it.)

Already last reset in Express (Reset ending 15 Jan 2012), there was a total of 5 techers or so (not counting people who tech started). It's the same syndrome with oilers - there isn't enough demand for oil to the point 1 or 2 countries can produce enough for the entire server, leading to periods of time there is none on the market.

To solve the above (A) and (B), the TPT formula would then have to be tweaked, along with the tech % formula, that's too many knobs to change at one go.

Using my suggestion would not cause all these potential problems, since the relative strength of the techer strategy would remain the same.

Keep in mind the dynamics of the game server: On Express and Primary, techers are generally extremely weak because land is easy to gain (for CIs for example). On Alliance, techers are very strong, because land is hard to get. We do not necessarily want to upset this balance.

I like the idea a lot... Much better than the way tech alliances work now IMO.

Mmm if techers are weak in tourney but most don't have a chance to use allies, wouldn't that help the non-allied techers by increasing tech; and also increasing demand, as each ally benefits *more* from allied techers.

I admit it was a spur of the moment idea, but I like the idea of making research alliances more than just about techers; it is currently the only strategy-specific relation

To implement your suggestion of sharing tech by tech allies without affecting game balance too significantly, TPT would have to increase by 30% for techers, and the tech points to % formula has to be adjusted down by 30% (or whatever % tech allies will share collectively if all of them are identical countries).

The sooner the current ones get removed the better, even if something new isn't developed yet.

remember the tpt change recently?

it helped techers by making their tech %ages while selling max higher, and everyone else by dropping tech prices

if you increase tpt and increase points to get x% tech you dont change anything, not sure why you would do that, unless you wanted tech to penalize/reward people in nw

so someone with lots of tech would find it harder to grab in good brackets, but easier to finish with high nw

anyway i like the change, also means techers need to tech what they want early in the set, not tech a few turns and just live off their allys teching

and it means late set if you go mbr you stop getting tech, as well as your ally, where currently only your ally stops getting tech

not sure if the cap should be 10% individually or 30% total to reduce the hassle of being exactly the same tpt

my biggest problem is that it basicaly super-charges a techer though....

if you cap it at 10% of each countries tpt then you reduce net gain

but you increase gain to the one actually teching, removing the transfer effect

the worst supercharge i can think of is startups you dont need to tech 1 turn in each country in FFA, and you could increase tech gained using cross landgrab circle pacts, but im not sure it would be worth the hassle

since normally you tech with the country that just grabbed and youd be trading increased land gain for tech, something like 1% for 1%

Hi qzjul, remember this thread?

Yes, qz, remember this?

I like Xinhuan's idea, not sure I get the point qzjul's counter-suggestion. Xinhuan's idea keeps the alliances as a way for techers to help one another with research points. qzjul's idea really has nothing to do with techers and just gives everyone free tech.

Also, as far as display for Xinhuan's idea, it could just show your own tech per turn (say it's 5000). Then when you tech 5000 indy tech it could say "You spent 1 turn and teched 5000 industrial points. You received 1000 industrial tech from your research allies" or something like that.

This is a very interesting idea. I prefer Xin's way of doing it though I think it will be a little overpowered and the % might need to be reduced slightly.

For some of the other ideas, I know I personally would prefer to keep away from ways that would require a lot of site recoding.

Overpowered? I don't understand how it's not exactly the same as what we have. Either way you get the exact same tech from the res allies, just in one case it comes when you tech and the other it comes when they tech.

Xin's idea was good.
But QZ's idea was good too.
Why not make both the changes? But country has to choose which benefit of Research Ally he wants?

i only glanced at the follow up posts, i don;t play techers generally ever, so take this with a grain of salt, but i very much like xins suggestion above.

when i sover up, i'll try harder to follow the duuscussion, of course :0

Xin's idea is definitely good, esp because people who've been playing for years still do not know how tech allies work lol.

ttt

ttt

I think Xin's suggestion is great

Looks like maybe I'm the only one who isn't particularly keen on Xin's idea. I usually play a tech country, and I like being able to help my alliance mates out.

For a solo server it may make sense, but on a server where it's all about teamwork.... I think if you want to let an alliance mate leech tech, you ought to be able to do so.

@Supertodd You can help your alliance mate by sending him FA.

FA and Declare War are disabled on solo servers (the option doesn't exist), so although Trade Pacts are not disabled on solo servers, they are effectively useless.

Qz should test this

And remove OAs from Express/Primary please, now that the back-end code has been moved over shouldn't be difficult.

I do like it... it does seem a *bit* one-sided though, as in strat-specific

How does it seem one-sided?

Only techers can use it. But that's really how it should be, isn't it?

For practical purposes, tech allies are only used by techers anyway.

Most other uses of it are leeching, which we want to avoid on solo servers.

You guys are missing the MAJOR flaw in Xinhuan's suggestion. It could easily be used to massively abuse the system.

Lets say you have 1 techer who is teching and getting extra tech based on his allies TPT. Those allies could simple grab/explore and then build labs, they would never have to tech at all really.

That 1 techer would basically be getting huge amount of extra tech each time he techs a turn and his allies would just be growing and building more labs. Would be way worse than any problems leeching is causing right now.

@BigBen If his allies are building labs, and not teching with those labs, then they are not making money. If they are not making money, then they can't grow or grab, they would instead get grabbed. You can go ahead and try running a 10k acres country with 7k labs, and 3k farms, and not tech a single turn and see where that gets you on solo servers.

If you have that much labs and are teching, then it isn't leeching, its a 2-way tech alliance.

That is a lot better than the tech leeching right now on solo servers.

Yeah, a simple response to Ben's critique is: wouldn't that person be much better off allying ACTUAL normal techers? There is no advantage to be gained by allying a strawman techer versus just making normal tech alliances.

Exactly what blid said, I couldn't have said it better.