Technology declines over time - bug?

[zed]

Hi guys
I've noticed that the technology for each product I research declines over time after I have researched it. Is thtat a bug or working as intended?
As an example, I've researched Cold Pills to 90, but within a year the tech is at 81.

[MagnusA]

Sounds like you have the option Technology Disruption set to On. This option have this very effect.

[zed]

Ok understood - thanks for the reply. So it's working as intended then? I take it this is meant to simulate how competition continually makes your tech obsolete forcing you to research continuously?

[MagnusA]

There are some info on the "Official Site" (link above). New Features -> Technology Disruption.

Overall that site has a wealth of CapLab info to browse.

[bdubbs]

Ok understood - thanks for the reply. So it's working as intended then? I take it this is meant to simulate how competition continually makes your tech obsolete forcing you to research continuously?

Personally I like this feature a lot but as stated above it can be turned off if you're playing a custom game by toggling the technology disruption on or off. I believe the way it works is your technology automatically declines by a certain flat % annually. Not entirely sure what that number is, but lets just say for arguments sake its 10%. Say the industry leader in computers has 200 product tech and you have 100 product tech. The next year their tech will drop by 20 and yours will only drop by 10.

What this effectively does is gives the lower tech company a better chance to compete by eroding the company with the higher product technology faster. This prevents a player from getting out ahead in tech early, dominating the market share for a product so nobody wants to compete, and turning off R&D. It also gives more value to spending the money on training at your R&D departments and researching over a longer horizon. It also gives you a reason to potentially use multiple R&D centers to research a key product.

I recently played a game where there was a HUGE market for cars, more than any other product by far. I decided to start with computers because the car industry can be tricky and is expensive to get started. I built R&D centers for all the major components several years before I started producing, and when I finally entered the market I found myself a little behind in tech to another company that specialized in automobiles and thus had a tech advantage that I didn't. When I entered the market there was still a ton of market share to be had, so I was able to outperform the other company easily without engaging in a price war, but they always had a tech advantage over me. I was able to offset this by quite a bit by having one R&D firm doing 1 year research on cars to offset my tech loss year to year while still giving me small gains, and then a second one set to 5 years which gave me the biggest boost I needed to close the gap until I was eventually able to buy up their stock and force a merger