technology snowballing: any mechanics against it?

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Tech costs increase from population size.

I never understood that. Shouldn't a higher population increase science? Considering there is a larger amount of people doing science, and a higher chance of producing an Albert Einstein, "exploding" science?
 
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My knee-jerk reaction is to be worried about that. What's the rate like? Does expanding still benefit your tech advancement even if you don't try to make some super academic research society?
What can be a problem is if a single tech can make an enormous difference all by itself. If each tech is helpful but not a gamechanger it should not be any big problems.

I never understood that. Shouldn't a higher population increase science? Considering there is a larger amount of people doing science, and a higher chance of producing an Albert Einstein, "exploding" science?

Pops can produce science so if they produce more then they cost you will develop technologies faster then you would without these pops.
 
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Tech costs increase from population size.

am i the onlyone who thinks thats awful?
why add such a weird artificial rubberband system to it? i think there are much more fun and realistic way's to handle this.

for example:
• make it so that populations do not automaticly generate research points (i think thats allready the case)
• make it harder to supply your population
• make tall empires more desirable (so it becomes a real alternative to wide empires) by increasing the upgrade possibilities of your buildings, spacestations etc in quantity and cost (so a tall empire has his buildings and stations on tier 10 while a wide empire is only on tier 2 or something)
 
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I never understood that. Shouldn't a higher population increase science? Considering there is a larger amount of people doing science, and a higher chance of producing an Albert Einstein, "exploding" science?
Yes you have more population available to do research, but having more population also makes increases the cost of implementing technologies as there is simply more to implement. I.E. It would be easier to give all of Estonia fiber internet than it would be for China or Russia.
 
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Nonlinear increase in tech cost with pops is OK - there should be diminishing returns on population otherwise rushing and growth based strategies will beat out everything else. A purely linear relationship would be very punitive for growth strats though and would make tech-focused traits / ethoses impossible to compete with.

I should also mention that war doesn't stop or even slow down your research as long as you don't lose of course.

I believe that being at war will make your pops less happy which will reduce their productivity - so yes it will. Militarists will not suffer from these penalties so severely.
 
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I never understood that. Shouldn't a higher population increase science?

That's how it works in Civilization V. It can be extremely problematic in terms of balance. Research a technology that increases agricultural productivity, increasing research output, decreasing time to next agriculture tech.

why add such a weird artificial rubberband system to it? i think there are much more fun and realistic way's to handle this.

for example:
• make it so that populations do not automaticly generate research points (i think thats allready the case)
• make it harder to supply your population
• make tall empires more desirable (so it becomes a real alternative to wide empires) by increasing the upgrade possibilities of your buildings, spacestations etc in quantity and cost (so a tall empire has his buildings and stations on tier 10 while a wide empire is only on tier 2 or something)

"Realism" is a terrible system, and it is only fun if it is balanced well and works. "Harder to supply the population" means what? Increased food upkeep? Because the population already grows at a fairly decent 2%/year for the Blorg on their capital planet.

There are upgrade possibilities and upgrades for space stations. Those alone do nothing coupled with your other suggestion to actually decrease the chance of tech snowballing. If anything, your suggestions sounds exactly like what they did for Civilization V, which had the massive effect of making tall empires so desirable that they're almost overriding.
 
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Yes you have more population available to do research, but having more population also makes increases the cost of implementing technologies as there is simply more to implement. I.E. It would be easier to give all of Estonia fiber internet than it would be for China or Russia.

this is a nice try to explain this bad mechanic, but its still wrong.
getting new shields or increase the range of your wormhole generators etc should not be harder to implement with a higher population.
 
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I never understood that. Shouldn't a higher population increase science? Considering there is a larger amount of people doing science, and a higher chance of producing an Albert Einstein, "exploding" science?

Maybe. Why aren't China and India the worlds' leading scientific nations though? Moar peeps = moar Science! is a common 4X mechanic, but like a lot of things in these games, it's an abstraction. Any "realistic" research model would mostly consist of reading piles of procedurally generated funding requests, and reports from your leading scientists rubbishing the work of the other leading scientists, and suggesting that moar moneys be given to them instead. Do we really *need* that many hospitals anyway?
 
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this is a nice try to explain this bad mechanic, but its still wrong.
getting new shields or increase the range of your wormhole generators etc should not be harder to implement with a higher population.

Yeah, that's a good point. The issue is that the major detriments to researching the next new shield or wormhole technology is the research, yes, and the cost of outfitting all your ships. The more ships you have, the more expensive new technologies are.

However, technologies like Administrative AI aren't tied to a building or unit component: the bonus just exists. So, scaling research costs to population size is good enough.

Maybe. Why aren't China and India the worlds' leading scientific nations though?

The Chinese patent office receives the greatest number of new patents/IPs annually in the world. India surpassed Japan and South Korea in the early-2010s.
 
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I have the slight Notion that most of the People being concerned about the science system will be the first to come up with a fancy minmax strategy. And do not be fooled by false hope: There will be one, it will have nothing to do with reality whatsoever and it will be abused. So what's the kerfuffle all about?

Never heard anyone seriously complaining about not-size-scaling research cost in EU4, though one might be puzzled at some point by Mainz being ahead of France .
 
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The Chinese patent office issues the greatest number of new patents/IPs annually in the world. India surpassed Japan and South Korea in the early-2010s.

Number of patents filed is a terrible measure of anything except how many bureaucrats you employ. It might take 50 patents to represent the changes improving the performance of a given water pump by 5%, and that's fine. "Anatomy of a hypertextual search engine" and its' little friends are currently worth over $500bn. The ideas that change the world in the next 50 or so years are probably not coming from its' most populous nations. A disproportionate amount of patents are issued in Switzerland too, mostly due to its' generous laws. The relationships between pop size and science production is complex at best
 
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Glad to see Wiz chime in here! Just to help keep things organized, the concept of tech snowballing has been brought up in at least a couple other threads before, this one and this one. It's good to see the development team take notice of this since a number of folks have been talking about it.

Stellaris does have a number of mechanics implemented to prevent Tech Snowballing. Tech growth slowing down as population increases, representing the additional effort to make a technology ubiquitous in a larger society, was used in previous Paradox titles like Victoria 2 as well. In addition, Stellaris' semi-random research system works well at mitigating traditional snowballing by encouraging breadth instead of shooting straight deep into a traditional Tech Tree. People have done a great job pointing out other mechanics that would help smaller Empires keep up and mitigate tech snowballing in these other threads.

Since Stellaris still does include stackable research boosting effects, including from random sources like tech, we'll have to see if the other mechanics in place will prevent tech snowballing from getting out of hand.
 
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As a scientist I am fairly convinced that in reality science output does not scale (much) with population size. Contrary to what Hollywood tries to make us believe, science is not about the individual genius but about patience, frustration tolerance and hard work. And about money. Give scientists resources and they will come up with something.
 
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Maybe. Why aren't China and India the worlds' leading scientific nations though? Moar peeps = moar Science! is a common 4X mechanic, but like a lot of things in these games, it's an abstraction. Any "realistic" research model would mostly consist of reading piles of procedurally generated funding requests, and reports from your leading scientists rubbishing the work of the other leading scientists, and suggesting that moar moneys be given to them instead. Do we really *need* that many hospitals anyway?

China has been the leading edge of science for most of human history. They went through a phase of a few hundred years where they became hide bound traditionalists that set them behind rather recently allowing other nations to surpass them. Since that phase ended they've made up tremendous ground on the leading nations so they are once again considered a world superpower.
 
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CIV V, upon release, was a completely different game than CIV V is right now.

Before playing Tall was king, there was ICS and abusing great scientist spawns (Madjinn's youtube exploits as Rome, for example).

In general, I'm not terribly concerned with Technology snowballing in Stellaris due to the systems Paradox has in their other games.