Acquiring Technology

I'm currently reading Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (heartily recommended for Civers and non-civers alike, by the way), and I was struck by the fact that many key technologies developed in relatively few places (The Alphabet, for instance, was only developed three times in history, in Mesopotamia, China, and Mesoamerica), and from there spreading outwards in two possible ways. Either the technology would be acquired by directly taking it from the holders (like spy actions in CIV), or the technology would be seen in action and engineered based on the fact that it could be done. My proposal is that once you've seen a unit using a certain technology, or if you have a diplomatic embassy in a nation, building the technology that you see would be "cheaper". OTOH, building a technology first-hand would be "more expensive".

This has several advantages: (a) Makes building a huge empire harder. (b) Encourages diplomacy and trade. (c) Make isolationist, war-like policies harder.

[Henrik]

Great Idea!

[DrFell]

Sounds like a good idea, maybe this could be changed so that you'd have to fight and defeat the unit (instead of just seeing it), be allied with the owner civ or whatever. So you'd copy the units weapons etc. once your scientists figure out how they work, the research period being the learning time.
[This message has been edited by DrFell (edited February 07, 2001).]