Inventions where art thou?

[mostly_harmless]

Not sure if this is a bug or not but in my last game I noticed that at some point inventions stopped occuring after the development of the main techs, despite being the USA I managed to get to the end of the game with about 22/25 in all categories and not be able to build anything more advanced than a man-of-war or build any modern factories. I thought it was just me until I looked at the WM and there are no phones, electric switches, cars, planes etc. at all. Looking round the world there is the odd ironclad but no sign of any cruisers or battleships? Is this in any way normal??

 

[King of Men]

Can't speak to the inventions, but your thread title is very bad grammatically. Inventions is plural, while thou is singular. You can write

"Invention, where art thou?"

or

"Inventions, where are you"

but you should not mix them like that.

 

[Darkrenown]

Either your prestige is under 0 meaning inventions won't fire, or your save is corrupt...meaning inventions won't fire

 

[Lamprey]

Can't speak to the inventions, but your thread title is very bad grammatically. Inventions is plural, while thou is singular. You can write

"Invention, where art thou?"

or

"Inventions, where are you"

but you should not mix them like that.

King of Men, this link's for you: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AnalRetentive

 

[unmerged(19936)]

Either your prestige is under 0 meaning inventions won't fire, or your save is corrupt...meaning inventions won't fire

I didn't know having prestige below 0 prevented inventions from firing. I learn some thing new everyday... from Darkrenown

 

[EUnderhill]

I didn't know having prestige below 0 prevented inventions from firing. I learn some thing new everyday... from Darkrenown

I have had plenty of inventions fire at negative prestige.

 

[jpd]

I have had plenty of inventions fire at negative prestige.

Me too. Either the 'no inventions if below 0 prestige' was valid for a pre 1.03 patch, or never has been valid.

I have played GC's as Austria where I ran over 70 years with constantly negative prestige, which has been as low as -320. It never hindered the triggering of inventions. The only thing negative prestige stops is the 'diplomatic deal' function, so you cannot trade for techs.

Jan Peter

 

[Memnon]

Well, I can't claim the honor of ever having had negative prestige long enough to notice whether or not inventions fire at all, but I can say for certain that low and negative prestige hinders the rate at which inventions fire.

The lower your prestige, the longer the inventions take. I always assumed that the code called for a decreasing scale of speed between the completion of the prerequisite technology and the discovery of the invention, something like: Prestige = 200, time to invention = 1 year; Prestige = 500, time to invention 3 months...or somehting like that, fixed for all inventions equally. It could be a simple linear equation for all I know, but it's more likely to be quadratic or above, I think.

Still, though, I had always pictured the bottom limit to be zero, and that at zero prestige, it would take infinite time to discovery an invention, if you follow me.

But if you can actually discover inventions while in negative prestige, it must have taken forever. You certainly can't run a whole game like that.

 

[jpd]

Oh yes, you can. No problem at all.

I have played multiple GC's as Austria, and some of the earlier ones I was running on negative prestige from the first event driven DoW, where I chickened out, taking a prestige hit in the process. Hey, I wanted to learn the economic aspects first, and didn't want to go to war at that time

The point is, I haven't found any difference at all in the speed at which inventions actually trigger between my worst game prestige wise (which bottomed out at -320) and my best game (cuirrently running at +2300 or so), and any game in between.

In all circumstances, I have had inventions trigger almost immediately after gaining the prerequisite tech, and inventions that seem to take forever. It's totally random, and given my heurisitic experience to date doesn't correlate with prestige value whatsoever.

Jan Peter

 

[mostly_harmless]

Either your prestige is under 0 meaning inventions won't fire, or your save is corrupt...meaning inventions won't fire

I had a prestige in the 2000s which left me ranked 3rd in the world, so guess its number 2 Also no one else seemed to be progressing either.

 

[mostly_harmless]

Can't speak to the inventions, but your thread title is very bad grammatically. Inventions is plural, while thou is singular. You can write

"Invention, where art thou?"

or

"Inventions, where are you"

but you should not mix them like that.

I do apologise, I've been neglecting my olde English of late

 

[Darkrenown]

Me too. Either the 'no inventions if below 0 prestige' was valid for a pre 1.03 patch, or never has been valid.

Really? Damnit, I don't know why I bother remembering how the game is meant to work as how it actually works is totally different!

 

[jpd]

Really? Damnit, I don't know why I bother remembering how the game is meant to work as how it actually works is totally different!

Are you sure about the fact that inventions weren't supposed to trigger when at less than zero prestige? If so, it would totally cripple a lot of nations, especially China.

How it works (now) at least gives nations like China the inventions that go along with techs, as they usually have negative prestige for extended periods, if not the entire game. Otherwise it would be utterly unable to industrialize at all with those nations.

Jan Peter

 

[Generalisimo]

Are you sure about the fact that inventions weren't supposed to trigger when at less than zero prestige? If so, it would totally cripple a lot of nations, especially China.

How it works (now) at least gives nations like China the inventions that go along with techs, as they usually have negative prestige for extended periods, if not the entire game. Otherwise it would be utterly unable to industrialize at all with those nations.

Jan Peter

AFAIK, you should get inventions while having less than 0 prestige, BUT, at a lower rate...
So, it should be more difficult for a country that has less than 0 prestige to get the new inventions... but it shouldn't be too difficult to get them after some years in the game (specially when the deathdate passes).

 

[Darkrenown]

Are you sure about the fact that inventions weren't supposed to trigger when at less than zero prestige? If so, it would totally cripple a lot of nations, especially China.

It was certainly believed back when most game questions were being answered by betas. I don't know if Johan ever said it was meant to work like that though.

 

[Memnon]

It was certainly believed back when most game questions were being answered by betas. I don't know if Johan ever said it was meant to work like that though.

It's news to me, too.

So, does that mean that in-game (meaning aside from the calculation ofpoints), prestige is really only useful for buying stuff off the WM and making diplomatic deals?

 

[Darkrenown]

I've been running a test game as haiti to test some VIP stuff for several hours now, I let myself go bankrupt so my prestige was negative and then researched some techs so I could test this at the same time. In 60 years NO inventions have fired.

 

[Memnon]

I just ran my own test game, and though I didn't have Darkrenown's patience, I did let the game run for twenty years. I played as Great Britain and ran the mosy lilly-livered administration in its history, not taxing its people at all and yet fundng everything to the max, especially education. I researched about half the techs, and my prestige hovered somewhere around -8000.

But I got an invention.

One invention.

Clauswitzian theory, in 1848. But that was all. As Hamlet said, "The rest is silence."

 

[jpd]

Well, all I can say is that in my Austian games I got (almost) all inventions that my techs had enabled, and a lot quite soon after I got my tech levels as well. Near the end of the GC, while still running negative in prestige, I had received all but a few advanced (bio)medical industrial inventions, all army inventions (except the one enabling the HQ brigade), most of the commercial ones and a handfull of culture inventions. I didn't research naval techs in these early learning GC's.

And I started running at negative prestige in 1847, when I backed down in the Slesvig question event. The first invention that fired not long after that was the Precision Work invention, enabling me to build a machine part factory, and start industrializing.

Mind you, those GC's were run with 1.03, not the 1.03 beta.

Jan Peter

 

[Jerzy_I]

If i remember correctly...Derek stated in a thread that having negative prestige significantly lowers the chance of getting an invention but there is still a chance.