Would this game better suite players if galactic tech was elastic banded?

[Dragatus]

A relatively simple way to do it would be to tweak all the diplomatic statuses to function as a minor research agreement and have them all stack additively.

For example Open Borders, Commercial Pact, Defensive Pact, and Migration Treaty could all give a 5% bonus to research speed for any technologies your partner has researched and they would all stack, so if you have them all that adds up to a 20% bonus. And if you had an actual Research Agreement on top of that the bous would be 45%. And if you had these treaties with multiple empires those would all stack too.

@fourteenfour The modifiers do make techs likelier to appear as research options, but they don't make them easier to research and that's key.

 

[Casko]

I prefer no elastic tech in Stellaris, as that's more a bandaid than a fix. Not to mention it would make things more boring, atleast for me to have every empire in the galaxy being of equal footing tech wise. Since there is something fun about beating utterly pathetic and weak backwards savage empire with your superior fleet power and purge their defects out of the galactic map .

This same thing happens with most all strategy games as well as generally making the AI cheat like that tends to leave a worse gameplay experience.


That said it would be a nice option to have that you can pick if its on or off at the game rules.

 

[Zagreb 887]

I want to be clear that I like the concept of super powerful spacefaring empires smashing much less advanced ones in a great galactic opera, and I don't want to tread on this aspect of science fiction and the game too much. But I feel like giving up some of the sheer magnitude of the tech divide possible in game might be worth it to fix several other aspects of the game that keep players wanting.

Stellaris terrible AI is here for so long it has become feature of the game! You make my day, thanks! I will remember it next time I complain about the AI being pathetic by 2230.

More seriously, totally agree with your idea, any mechanic that can help the retarded AI to keep up with the player is welcome.

 

[rubert]

I don't think I would want it for the current Stellaris. Elastic tech could work for the future sequel where the game can be designed for it but trying to band-aid it to the current game probably doesn't give very good or fun result. If anything, I'd like to have the tech costs, research points etc. rebalanced as currently the research part of the game ends up in expotential growth where each tier becomes faster and faster.

Tech cost scaling was talked in the older thread: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...esearch-is-far-too-fast-in-this-game.1470409/