Law of diminishing marginal returns

Did you notice that the law of diminishing marginal returns is applied twice?
First, as the level increases, the amount of science that has to be poured into research is higher.
Second, the effect of a breakthrough is less important.
For example, if you have weapons lvl 1 and you discover weapons lvl 2, it takes 144 science and makes a 100% increase in weapons efficiency.
If you have weapons lvl 2, discovering weapons lvl 3 would take 288 science and makes a 50% increase.
And so on for higher levels.
So in effect we have the (law of diminishing marginal returns) squared, or ldmr²
So I suggest the increase of efficiency should be between 20%-25% with each upgrade.

Thoughts?

Yeah, the whole thing needs some rebalancing. There are several threads discussing both Experimentation and Banking needing to be fixed. Both are really good early in the game, but diminish in effectiveness by the mid game, and are pretty worthless to research late in the game. Both return to being good when you are getting crushed, as they give you fixed income and science, though by the time they become useful again, you are being handed your hat and shown the door.

Similar applies to Terraforming.

Maybe Banking and Experimentation should work just like Manufacturing, but apply to Sci and Ind instead. That would take a bit of reworking how they are calculated, but it could be done.

2 Likes

Actually, I like that there are different ages of technology, and that some technologies are useful early on, while others are useful later. Makes them feel less generic and allows some strategic decisions like whether to go for techs that will be obsolete later but are very useful now, etc.

That was the original thinking, but I dont think its very popular.