Is there a way to make research stop or slow significantly after a certain era?

[Nathan]

I like playing early game, and prefer small maps. over 20 cities gets just annoying to manage, and I'll play the game on for dozens of hours.

I would rather play just through the first age and a half, then have it significantly increase in research effort, or stop it altogether at any given tech/time period.

A good example is swordsman. You research it, then have to get iron. Once you connect it and maybe build a swordsman or two, boom you're at pikemen/Med inf. Defeats the purpose of getting them IMO.

If anyone can point me to the ini or a mod that would allow me to tweak some of these settings, I would be most grateful!

[Menssie]

You can change game settings with Civ3 Editor.
Go to:
...\steamapps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization III Complete\Conquests
Run Civ3ConquestsEdit.exe
Go to File -> Open...
Look in: ...\steamapps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization III Complete\Conquests\Scrnarios
Open File name: conquest.biq
Go to Rules -> Edit Rules...
Select General Setting tab
Under Technology, change Maximum Research Time (Or leave it as it is)
Select Civilization Advances tab
Select Civilization Advance you wish to edit and change Cost
When you are done with editing, press Close
Go to File -> Save As...
Give your File a name and save
Exit editor
Run game, select Civ-Content and then your scenario file.

For start, test it with one tehnology just to see the effects.

[rodrigo]

Just to build on that.

The default game sets min/max speed for new technologies at 4/40 turns.

There are a few ways you can slow down the game:

(i) In the editor, you can flag some technologies (or all) as "non-tradable". Not allowing AI to trade tech will definitely slow the game down.

(ii) You can also increase the minimum research time from 4 to 8 turns, or even to 12 turns. This will slow down the game overall.

(iii) You can go and manually edit the cost of each technology. Let's say you go and edit each one of the 50 techs that come after Feudalism and double their base cost - and then you move the min/max of new tecnologies to 8/60 turns. This will also help you.

(iv) Finally you can add new expensive techs when you want the game to slow down. For example, you can add two or three very expensive techs coming after Construction, and you can do the same after Gunpowder, etc. This will make the game follow its regular speed but there will be some bottlenecks on those new techs you're adding.

You kind of have to try it out and see what works best for you.

[Nathan]

Originally posted by Menssie:

You can change game settings with Civ3 Editor.
Go to:
...\steamapps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization III Complete\Conquests
Run Civ3ConquestsEdit.exe
Go to File -> Open...
Look in: ...\steamapps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization III Complete\Conquests\Scrnarios
Open File name: conquest.biq
Go to Rules -> Edit Rules...
Select General Setting tab
Under Tehnology, change Maximum Research Time (Or leave it as it is)
Select Civilization Advances tab
Select Civilization Advance you wish to edit and change Cost
When you are done with editing, press Close
Go to File -> Save As...
Give your File a name and save
Exit editor
Run game, select Civ-Content and then your scenario file.

For start, test it with one tehnology just to see the effects.

I'm just now getting a chance to dig into the files and try this, thanks for your answer!

I started with just changing the intro-to-medieval techs to 120 as opposed to the default 44, and just played 3ish hours casually to see what the result of that was. Ole honest Abe declared war on me and got clapped back at, so I spent the majority of a millennium at war slowly capping his cities.

Having to focus on Barracks/units, I was very alarmed to be supposedly backwards technologically, and until 400ish AD, every Ai (3 on my continent/met) had 3+ techs to trade vs my zero. Only playing on #2 difficulty (Regent?), I'm not used to ever even having the option to get techs from them, I'm usually ahead. After doing some trades for 2-3 techs, I got caught up according to the adviser in the trading screens with the AI. - this is right when I'm getting 3-4 libraries across my like 15-18 cities (slowly backing off of unit production).

Aside from not really boosting my money to research for the first 3-4ish cities I built into the game, why would this be? on difficulty 4 I would maybe expect to HAVE to trade with them to even keep up, but definitely not on diff 2.

[Nathan]

Originally posted by <AWP>Rodrigo:

Just to build on that.

The default game sets min/max speed for new technologies at 4/40 turns.

There are a few ways you can slow down the game:

(i) In the editor, you can flag some technologies (or all) as "non-tradable". Not allowing AI to trade tech will definitely slow the game down.

(ii) You can also increase the minimum research time from 4 to 8 turns, or even to 12 turns. This will slow down the game overall.

(iii) You can go and manually edit the cost of each technology. Let's say you go and edit each one of the 50 techs that come after Feudalism and double their base cost - and then you move the min/max of new tecnologies to 8/60 turns. This will also help you.

(iv) Finally you can add new expensive techs when you want the game to slow down. For example, you can add two or three very expensive techs coming after Construction, and you can do the same after Gunpowder, etc. This will make the game follow its regular speed but there will be some bottlenecks on those new techs you're adding.

You kind of have to try it out and see what works best for you.

Thanks for your reply!

I've tweaked a few manually, but it's my first time in the editor and it seems sensitive - so I refrained from clicking around too much... How do I implement suggestion ii in your reply?

-Doubling them all sounds awesome, I like accelerated production but think the research can get too short when you're breezing by at 3-5 turns per tech and that sounds like a great general edit :)

[helix2]

Following! This thread really speaks to me. Someone told me about an old mod that focused on the early period, but it seems to have been taken down. The game is older. I would love a game that focused in these early days, especially the exploration.

[Menssie]

Increase minimum research time option is under General Setting tab, Technology section.