So, you'd be just as adamant that any progress towards a Wonder shouldn't be affected if that city is lost either? It takes turns and turns to complete a wonder, maybe dozens, we don't know.

You'd want that Wonder progress loss to be minimal if the city was lost and you'd prefer no loss at all.

Same if you're building a deathstar space station.

Right?

I agree: total research loss upon losing a city would be..... bad. Some techs in GC2 took hundreds of turns to research. A slight dip wouldn't be too bad, though: maybe a standard two-turn "reintigration" hold on that ctiy's research.

By the same logic I also hate losing units and buildings I'm producing. When I lose a city it should simply be duplicated and moved to some other location in my empire.

Yes, that's exactly the point. You're arbitrary separating the effort of tech from the effort of everything else. Why call it out as a special exception to the rule? Most techs took less time to research than the effort to build most wonders and even some units in both GalCiv and Civ. If you're argument is that tech loss is back breaking, then the effort lost in those other things that take even MORE time would also be back breaking.

It takes effort to produce something, be it physical or mental. It's an arbitrary distinction to say that this effort deserves special protection while all the other things that take effort don't. In wars, sabotaging an opponents capability to produce is a very valid tactic, be it bombing a factory or destroying research facilities. That's not a strawman.

You seem to have attached this hyper sensitive protected status to the act of research without giving any reasons why you think it should be special beyond "people might quit", which is a complaint that can be levied to any significant loss.

If techs and wonders were the same they'd probably not have different names.

Techs are vital to success in just about every game, while wonders are usually optional. Wonders are more likely to be unique to the first faction that builds it as well as being more visible while building. Maybe it wouldn't be a straw man if I was talking about buildings, since you know, wonders are usually buildings, but I didn't. I'm talking about researching.

If your looking for "realism" justification it's reasonable to assume that any plans, ideas, basic prototypes, etc. would be shared to the empire prior to a major attack. As someone said before, medieval research was usually just finding tons of ways to fail and is more knowledge based than prototype based. It's not like they are trying to move big mechanical prototypes from place to place.

More imporantly, gameplay wise there is really no reason for this. You talk about ruining an opponents ability to do research and it being a valid tactic. It still is regardless of whether the player loses massive amounts of research when you take over his city. By taking over the city you just put a halt to any further researching on that tech for what is likely going to be a long time. It doesn't even stop you from targetting cities known to be research centers.

Since most games do little to stop steamrolling by a dominant player, if I'm going to err, I'm going to do it on the side of preventing steamrolling, rather than making it easier. Since people tend to quit with "significant loses" there's no need to make loses that are already very significant even more so (and certainly not by arbitrarily pretending that  no one in my empire learned anything from the 75 years of research I was doing before that city was captured). I don't need every game I play to be decided by one pivotal city take over.

Where the f**k are you getting this stuff? I said nothing of the sort. And where do you get MASSIVE amounts of research? Look at any GalCiv or Civ tech before the uber end game stuff and you're talking 5-10 turns typically to research something. Sometimes just a turn or two. How is that massive? Maybe 20-30 turns for a bigger tech.

You lose one lab, so what. You lose, say, 20 turns towards one project. Throw in a gameplay mechanic that says your scientists escape with 75% of the research and it's just a 5 turn loss (yes, I did alude to something like this mechanic in my first post). You build a new lab and start that project again or have a different lab take up the task.

Where the hell is this HUGE, MASSIVE loss you're complaining about? You're just making crap up at this point with waving hands in the air. I can see why you have zero karma. Your posts make little sense at all and invent things never said.

Why look at the glass half empty? If it is bad for YOU to lose research when you lose a city it would be EQUALLY bad for your opponent. Really, it adds a whole new dynamic to the game, because as you got near completion of a major research project, you might want to call in a few of your roaming armies to protect your research investment (if it was in any danger in the first place.

I really don't follow Touresh's line of reasoning and agree with CK - with everything you lose with a city, losing the research on the currently researched item would make you hit the reset button??? Seriously?

And I just got to reiterate - no matter how bad it is, you have an equal or better chance (assuming you are a better player) of inflicting the same damage on your opponents (AI or human).

Nopt to worry though, it really doesn't look like SD is going this direction anyway. I wish they would as it would be innovative and I think it would add to the game.

I think this is a good idea and it has absolutely nothing to do with losing buildigns or losing research.

Here's an example implementation:

You have research sites 1, 2 and 3 with an output of 10 research each.

You could have 30 rp focused on a single tech (single tech research model).

You could divide these points however you like, but that would always be less effective than putting all in one place in sequence.

Or you could assign each site to one research, and each tech would only get benefits from the best research site. This means to double your tech output you must research two techs.

Now the downside is you can't concentrate on a single tech and get benefits. That can be circumvented by using randomness or diminishing returns:

Jsut change the output so it's random: Sites give 5-15 output.

If you put all sites on researching the same thing, instead of researching one tech with an average of 10 points per turn, you receive that tech with an average of 12* points per turn (* ok it's not 12, it depends on the random number distribution and I'm not going to do the math, as results would be very different if the randomness is a bell curve or linear...).

There are other ways of increasing the average without using randomness, but I think random is cool as it illustrates the serendipity of technological advancement. For instance, the second best site only provides 1/2 its output, the third 1/3rd, etc.

This whole discussion is just another example of lack of imagination I think. Why on earth is research localised? Why on earth should we lose portions of the research once the research site is captured? Maybe a slight setback can be ok sometimes, but it is not required imo.

Why do you guys think the benefits of a tech are available empire wide once a tech is completed? I always kinda assumed that researching a tech is not just finding out how stuff works. For example, finding out how to make iron from raw ore is not just a process of figuring out how to do it, but also of making the idea widespread, making facilities empire wide to be able to make iron, getting naysayers convinced that making iron is a good idea, etc. Therefore this 'research' as it is called is in fact not just the research side of the story. It is also the experimenting, the process of spreading the knowledge, some techs may require making legislation, etc.

When looking at research this way then the 'research' part only makes up a small portion of the process and you can explain just fine why losing cities does not hurt your overall research process. This way losing cities will just hurt because you lost a good site, not because your research is hit as well. 

That may be, but losing your research on a big tech every time the bad guys come knocking would IMHO make the game rather.... tedious. People probably wouldn't quit the first few times, but that sort of prolonged status quo would get boring very rpidly.

Because social scientists are a terribly small part of the audience for Civ-form games? And maybe even more because the weakest part of modeling in these games is how time works?

Faux-snarky talk aside, I generally agree with you about much of the balking about losing a research site seems a bit narrow-minded. In particular, I have almost zero sympathy for a "that would be no fun" argument about an *idea* for a game. I'll reserve judgement for a build running on my PC.

Goodmorning alll,

One thing to take into account is that some of the economic discusion focuses around the existance of specilized cities. It is not a huge strech to imagin that Elemental will have some bonuses for creating a city specially fucused on producing research. (buildings that provide a blanket +% to all research production in this city is the normal way to do this).

Therefore having labs spread out over multiple cities will carry a non trivial disadvantage.

On a sperate note, CIV 4 Has a dotting of pivital high cost research techs (Civil Service, Monotheism, the techs that unlock religions) amougnst a slew of lower cost fast finishing techs.  Loosing half of one of the long haul research techs would truely be crippling. 

That being said.  Having a mechanism where research buildings have to be properly populated, and some build up RP can be lost due to forced relocation would make the game more limited.

Lastly the people who would leave due to loosing a city will leave tech loss or no tech loss. The solution is to reward players for staying in the game longer, and lable them as game abandoners so that people can choose to not join games with them if abbandonment is truely frustrating for them. Trying to make the game forgiving enough that abandoners won't abandon is the wrong way to go.

Take care  Robbie Price

I think that a more snesible soution would be to have a DELAY in research as your people re-integrate to new labs: for two turns or whatever, you simply don't research on that tech. It's realistic, but it also doesn't unfairly nerf people. In fact, I'd say it's even MORE realistic: if you destroy a lab, scientists don't just magically forget all of their work.

Even then, I would assume that they would send regualr backups of their notes to other scientists and the channeler himself. We've pretty much agreed that a commodity of information system would be more trouble than it's worth for the vast majority of players.