Civ 5 Research Agreements
I finished the Hubble Space Telescope at Turn 276 and the Apollo program at Turn 278. This began the burning process of my great scientists saved on technical light bulbs, each of which costs just over 8000 cups. Unfortunately, I had only managed to accumulate four, no, thanks to that stupid resolution of the World Congress that slowed down the generation of great scientists, and the ridiculous ideological absurdities that denied me the principle of order to raise the generation of the Great Person. It still left me with about five technicians behind what I needed to complete the spacecraft, which meant that more incredibly boring curves awaited the technicians` slow exploration process. Every twist meant waiting for all the AIs to process their movement and production phases, and then dealing with all sorts of diplomatic villains that don`t matter but take time. (AIs love to appear all the time with random denunciations and commercial articles. This happens all the time at the end of the game.) Then there`s notification spam on the right side of the screen, usually half a dozen messages that appear every turn. Almost all of them are completely useless, but you never know when something important might be in there. I have to read them all to be sure.
Many, many things happen, nothing important or interesting for the outcome of the game. These twists and turns have just crawled. Currently, I have done research in archaeology, which has led to the appearance of a number of ancient sites on the map. I had no idea how this mechanic worked, so I built an archaeologist unit and brought him in to investigate one of the sites. After five laps of trenching, I received this notification: You must for me. After modern times comes the atomic age, and after that comes the information age. Dear Sir, this tech tree lasts forever! One of the quiet things about the Civ5 expansions was the number of additional technologies added to the game. There were 72 technicians in the tech tree of the original version, and the extensions added seven more, for a total of 79 technicians. It may not seem like much, but the expansions have also significantly increased the cup costs of these technicians compared to the final version of Civ5, significantly resulting in the game. All the additional technologies of the information age are like adding a whole new era to the tech tree. Unfortunately, these additional technologies don`t add much to the game, as the new content consists mostly of even later units that need to be built, which will rarely have much impact because they appear so late in the tree. Most of the time, these extra technicians just drag the game out for a long period of time, forcing your civilization to explore more technicians to reach the finish line.
Very little happens so late in the game: no more tile upgrades to add, nothing to do with the workers, there is no point in starting more cities or going to war because of the search penalty. It`s simple. boring. Contrary to what advertising would have everyone believe, adding more material to a game doesn`t necessarily make it better. I don`t see the point of delaying the endgame with additional technicians. This results in 50% more cups from research contracts. I already had the Porcelain Tower Miracle doing the same thing, so I would get the maximum 100% bonus on every research agreement I made. I signed a few earlier with the AIs, and the first round was already over, each seemed to be worth a little more than free technology. Search agreements are another mechanism that has been around since the release of Civ5, and they have undergone many different iterations during different patch cycles. They were also one of the most broken aspects of this game, with various abuses of the search agreement mechanics allowing experienced players to make their way through half or more of the tree.
I confess that I do not know the current mechanics; I searched a bit on CivFanatics, but most of what I could find came from previous outdated patches. It seems that they were pretty much listening in Brave New World. (Although there is an obscure bug/exploit that allows players to get hundreds of thousands of cups for free with research chords and break the game COMPLETELY. This has not been corrected and never seems to be corrected. EDIT: Of course, two days after writing this, this new patch came out of nowhere and fixed this problem. Hats off, Firaxis! ) The bends continued to crawl with little interest to report. I turned to plastics technology for Research Labs and launched it with the University of Oxford. .
