Replace research trades with a 'tech license' system

A very interesting idea.

Sounds good to me.

I would think this could be easily accomplished with a simple data flag on each tech to indicate whether it was 'researched' or not.

Creating the often requested 'no-tech-brokering' game option would create and use this same exact data, so why not make it more interesting?

Yup, the actual effort to do this would be pretty minor - and no tech brokering is already in the game. It's a cool addition which can be put in reasonably easily and has many benefits.

I really like this idea!

I'm really liking this to.  Especially the part where it fixes unwanted tech specialization gifts.

I always play with no tech brokering. Tech trading yes, but no tech brokering...

This is an excellent idea. Any way it could possibly be modded into the base game?

I don't think so. Near as I can tell it'd require dev intervention.

I really like this idea as well.

Well, ill be the first to say, that I dislike this idea. 

While I'm not a realism fanatic, the idea that you get benefits from a tech and can employ it, but still have to research it and don't really understand it, is counter intuitive. 

Maybe if the tech was discounted in research by half it would be ok. To represent the fact that we would always be reverse engineering any technical assistance. 

In fact, we all do this on a daily basis. Does everyone understand everything about their car, computer, or plumbing system in their home? Nope. Do we use them every day anyway? Yup.

"Tech Licensing" is basically an abstract way of saying "We'll sell you the blueprints to make iPads, but we won't tell you how they actually work."

I initially thought the same but then I started to think of it more like an "imported work force". Say you license someone one of the farm techs - the way I see it is you are borrowing some workers from that civilization for the period of the license who come out and build those farms for you. Yes, you would eventually be able to reverse engineer it but that takes resources and time as well (hence the reduced cost of researching it yourself). You don't just get handed something and immediately understand the concepts of how it was created.

Same with say, beam tech. I imagine it is something more along the lines of they have agreed to train you in the use of those weapons and supply them for a cost (signified by the manufacturing cost you pay when installing - sure not 100% accurate but close enough) so you can use them. You don't however immediately understand how they work/are created.

There is a enormous difference between individuals who comprise a incredibly small part of a system (a society), and the system as a whole. You can't compare a random citizen to the entire society. I'm also open to compromise, its understandable that we wouldn't understand everything about a tech right away, but it certainly speeds things along to have a finished product, that you can mass produce.

If you give me Durantium Composite... and I build 100 components of it across my whole fleet, I'm going to have a pretty good idea how it works, more so, had you never given me the ability to manufacture it.

The "I'm not really trading you a tech, I'm selling you components and expertise" is already kind of represented by the ability to outright purchase other people's ships (which if I was a fanatic, I would argue should give you progress on ALL the techs that were involved in that ship's components lol). IE the limited sale of equipment.

The issue I have, is that in general, technology is something that has proven difficult to contain, its far more likely that giving a race access to ANY equipment will lead them to develop that same ability/equipment capacity faster. The implication here is that it wouldn't make things go along ANY faster, and I just don't find that reasonable. Getting say, 30-50% of the Tech as a result of the trade, satisfies my need to represent that.

I think that normal tech trading should be retained alongside the licensing system. Sometimes you may want to genuinely jump-start a race in order to serve as a buffer between you and another empire, become an improved trading partner, etc.

The original proposal reduces the amount of science it takes for you to research the tech itself, which I believe is exactly what you are looking for.

Quite correct, that is what I get for reading/posting on the train!

Maybe realism is unimportant to some when it makes the game arguably better but licensing tech? Please, it is one thing to license a resource that you control, If the license expires you can withhold the resource. Tech is science, an idea, not a product. It must be understood and applied by your people. If you can use a tech, you must understand the tech and no one can stop you from using it as long as you have the resources to build it.

I suppose if you felt compelled to add this, the discount suggested in the OP could be considered a back engineering factor that would make it feasible, but the discount should be at least 50%. It should also be waived entirely if you are allied with the trading faction.

"If you can use a tech, you must understand the tech"

You need to know that when I read this... my head translated it into:

"To Defeat the Bug! We must Understand the Bug!"

Followed by... "We can ill afford another Klendathu"

I then cheered. Kudos to those who get the reference

Pretty much the entire tech sector in the real world operates using licensing models... so yeah, not really seeing your point here. For example, pretty much every hard drive in the world is built in Thailand. But pretty much all drive tech advances happen in either the US or Japan. Merely because the Thai population build the drives, does not mean that they have the slightest idea how to design the components involved, or have an in-depth grasp of the appropriate time to use a 15000rpm drive instead of a 7200.

Any mature technology can be operated, and even constructed, without any understanding of the underlying principles. If my empire teaches yours how to build a laser cannon for a specific model of fighter, that doesn't mean you know how to adapt it for a different mount, or could effectively service units which are already in use. 

So I can tell the US military not to worry about selling China the blue prints for patriot missile systems! They will be so happy to hear that lol.

Hard drives are made in Thailand because of the economics, and Thailand manufacturers have little economic incentive to develop new drives (probably the opposite, as new drives might mean new equipment/technique/etc. which have costs).

There is a entrenched innovation industry in the US and other places, and as a result, other companies don't chomp at the bit to challenge it. Its a bit like incumbents in elections.

Your example is a factor of globalized capitalism, and it doesn't show that Thai corporations don't understand (or couldn't incredibly quickly figure it out) how their hard drives work. They also have no reason to care unless they choose to compete.

Remove the entrenched industry players though, and you would see many new companies all over the world start investing in R&D on hard-drives.

And, its all not representative of what we are talking about. We are not talking about corporations whose only goals are profit, we are talking about civilizations, or at least governments and their millitaries, who have a VERY vested interest in understanding any new technology, even if it isn't exactly profitable. While certainly the other party would try to limit how much we could reverse engineer something they sell us, its unlikely to succeed. Look at nuclear proliferation for example, despite massive efforts to prevent this technical understanding from spreading, it is. 

Galciv's universe in my opinion is:

1) Not as economically globalized as Earth

2) Culturally less homogenized than Earth (maybe Earth today has the same variety, but not in scale, all major world powers today, are capitalist-ish, few operate at the sort of extremes you have in GalCiv, and those that do, do not do so on an even footing)

3) Due to the accelerated aspects of advanced technological, its historical time frame is accelerated. IE, 100 turns in GalCiv might be a few years of realtime, but the historical comparisons and effect would be closer to 100 to 200 years of real earth history. Which makes it unique.

These factors leave any comparison to "today", less than ideal, and comparisons to anything less than government level organizations inappropriate. GalCiv's factions are more akin to imperialist nation states and the like anywhere from 1500AD to 1914AD. But the pace of events is much more rapid.

Personally, the idea of licensing with a 50% gain of the tech is growing on me. But, ultimately, tech trading is not a bad feature, it is a standard element of many 4X games, it doesn't add anything significant to the game that is "fun" (it fixes one small complaint about tech specializations which would be better fixed by letting you reject gifts, which is needed for other reasons), and its going to be counter-intuitive to new players. If I were the designer I'd quickly triage this idea into the "Kinda nice, but we will never have time for"

The US military happily sells all sorts of stuff to other powers - the entire UK nuclear deterrent, for example, is a combination of US-built equipment and US-designed equipment built in the UK on license. This happens all he time. Germany sold Japan seaplane licenses immediately after WW1, a conflict where they were on opposing sides. Germany later licensed Japanese carrier technology. The British embedded scientists and engineers in both the US and USSR armed forces during the war; vast amounts of cold war-era British technology relied on US licenses (and was then sold on to other countries in turn). South Korea and Taiwan both produce large numbers of US aircraft models on licenses.

It is, quite simply, how technology transfer actually happens, instead of government A granting Government B the big box of documents which outlines everything to do with a technology (which, as far as I can tell, has only ever happened ONCE in all of history, with the UK's nuclear secrets being given to the US in the early 1940s - quite literally in a big box).Frankly, tech trading in the traditional 4X context is far, far, far less realistic than a license system would be.

As to the other parts of your post: No, Thailand would not suddenly develop a thriving hard drive R&D sector if the US, Japan and Europe weren't taking up all the innovation in the world. Thailand does not have the technical skills base to compete in the area, in spite of all those millions of drives produced every year. The innovation complex in the US and EU is a result of a post-industrial knowledge economy workforce - the infrastructure is present. This isn't to say that Thai citizens can't learn how a drive works; but taking one to tiny pieces doesn't really help much in teaching you how to build one, and not one of the guys working in those factories has an advanced computer science degree; nor has their time in that factory gotten them any closer to acquiring one.

In some cases, we very much are talking about corporations - one of the Empires actually has 'corporation' in it's name, and there's no reason to assume that those numerous markets which we construct on our planets aren't operating in a free market. And corporations are just as likely to attempt to reverse-engineer a rival's product as any government.

Oh, and actually nuclear non-proliferation has worked bloody well. It's been 70 years since the first nuclear weapon was built, and in that time 8 organizations have acquired one (at least 2 of those from licensed tech). That's rather a lower rate than, say, the washing machine or the AK-47. By comparison, Thomas' Basic Process of steel production took less than 5 years to spread to every industrial nation on earth at the time, vastly increasing steel output at a time when it was the #1 military resource on earth (and was spread largely through licensing, which the British government could have put a stop to but didn't). 

One example would be diesel engines, which were developed in Germany and licensed to manufacturers in other nations (the US and UK among others). Scientists in both countries understood how diesel engines worked, but their attempts to make their own were not always successful. So there were parts of the manufacturing process that were, if not secret, at least closely held - or not understood without lots of experience with diesels.

If I recall correctly, enemy firms were paid after the World Wars for equipment built under license. So a better formula might be to 'sell' the tech with payments over time but only permit a few uses of it (or a percentage of its effect) until the tech is fully paid for. I think this would be most useful for techs specific to a race or faction.

The US loves to sell weaponry, we all know this, but the US doesn't love to sell weaponry to what we perceive as our rivals. Hence my reference to China. But why don't we? Because they know, that if you sell valuable equipment and expertise to a rival, they will develop their own independent capacity to use such technology and enhance upon it much more rapidly than otherwise.

In every instance you mentioned, the result has been the recipient country understanding the technology and being able to replicate it on their own within a short time frame (lets just call it 5-10 years, yes, I consider that short). Considering the advanced modeling computing technologies that any Civ in GC3 possess, not to mention the collasol scale of resources even a 2-3 planet empire enjoys (compared to our current nations), there is every reason to believe that 5-10 years would be truncated/accelerated significantly.

Also, consider the expense of shipping actual components in the GC3 universe... and their communication capacity seems to be rather nice, so why wouldn't you sell a transmission filled with technical information? Shipping the components and such would come with increased overhead, and if you believe they would end up understanding the technology in just a year anyways.. why not save the resources and trouble? You don't sell tech to your enemies, so you are not THAT afraid of how they are going to use it... and if you are... don't sell it lol.

I'm guessing we are not going to agree here. Which is cool. as a game feature, it isn't bad, but I just don't see it as a must have priority when we have SO much more stuff that needs help.

I don't really see how this is relevant to the discussion tbh. It's exactly the same whether you use a license model or a direct trade model in this instance - if you don't want to trade them to others, then just don't sell them the license in exactly the same way you presently don't sell them the tech.

Also, the reason the US doesn't sell arms to China is due to the post-Tienanmen Square arms embargo. From 1980-1989, both Europe and the USA sold vast amounts of high-tech weaponry to China, and would probably still be doing so (like Russia quite gleefully does, despite seeing China as their biggest security threat - and in fact China still acquires lots of US weapons systems via Israeli licensing and on-sales).

Alright then. In the 1500s, Europeans sold guns to the Native Americans. Three hundred and fifty years later, not one Native American nation had developed an arms industry capable of producing a single original rifle, even though they used them in large numbers. If you want to design a decent gun, you need to have a good understanding of several different sciences - metallurgy, ballistics, chemistry, engineering, mechanisms. And that's really just a sealed tube with gun powder in the end - consider how many different sciences you need to know to design a microprocessor, or an aeroplane. Are you putting all of that stuff into the box?

Also, your argument kinda supports my point that real-world tech transfers occur through a system much more like licensing and much less like diplomatic tech trades. 

Well, I'm already sending out massive freighters full of something or other, so why not arms? Why would I be willing to ship over a thousand tons of clothing, but when it comes to my latest top-secret weaponry plans I'll just give them away instead? 

Or if you want to go the transmission-only approach, why not send him limited use 3D printer files? Just add a destructive read subroutine; this can already be done with modern equipment. Send him 50 Read Once blueprints a week until I decide to stop doing so. And why are you assuming I'm only interested in selling licenses to my enemies? I'd sooner sell licenses to everyone. I have permanent interests but no permanent allies

Besides, I may be 3 or 4 tiers of tech ahead of some AIs who I wish to sell licenses to. This is selling rifles to the natives again. Quite frankly, there's nothing to say you won't get Doom Rays before the other guy has picked up Matter Disruption; it's likely to rely on branches of science the recipient hasn't even heard of yet. Kinda like an inverse Outside Context Problem; the weapons are so powerful that the recipient can't even begin to understand them. He just knows that they come out of his primitive 3D printing device and work. 

Well, it's got potential to help with diplomacy, which is currently massively crap and is exactly one of those things that does need sorting ASAP. If diplo wasn't screwed up already, then I wouldn't be suggesting changing how it works to improve it. Licensing as a tech trade system has been tried in other games, and worked well; it prevented the worst excesses of player tech trade abuse while still permitting the player to pick up advanced tech from other players.

Look I'm going to let my part go here. Other's deserve the talking space. 

But on a seperate note, with or without tech licensing... how about limiting the techs you can buy/sell to stuff the receiving party can currently attempt to research?

It would at least slow how many techs you can acquire in a given diplo-trade from one party, because you'd have to wait for the next trade cycle to continue moving down a tech chain.