Tech Swapping - A Brief Guide

Please excuse me if this has been stated elsewhere or is a given for many players:

As you may or may not know, techs increase in cost by around 16 percent science every time you unlock another new tech. This is additive (see Diagram 1), so if I've researched 2, now that tech is 36 percent more expensive than the original cost. But what if I told you that you could get around this?

It works this way - research techs that you know you might need but don't need right away, then 1 turn from completing it push another tech to the front of the list. This means that not increasing the cost of other techs, reducing the total cost that you would have to pay for them. Leave it at 1 turn and keep forcing new techs to the front of the queue. Only finish the techs that you absolutely need and can make use of right away. 

Often in the early game, I can blow throw T1, T2 and some T3 techs almost twice as fast as I normally would by tech swapping. After discovering this technique I have not gone back.

This does a couple of things - you will fly through the tech tree much faster because you'll be saving all that research and this has amazing synergy with Sophons and the Scientist political party.

Sophons start out with Omniscience and have reduced costs on all research if no one has researched yet. This means you can cherry pick further into the tech and will be saving on the research that way, but on top of that because you're only finishing what you absolutely need, you're going to absolutely rip through the tech tree. For example, most of the tech lvl 3 science buildings are available to research from the beginning of the game for the Sophons.

This works great when scientists are in power with other factions as well because you can jump into tier 3 to grab the afformentioned T3 science buildings as well as T3 industry buildings. 

Is this intended? I've never read anywhere about people making use of this, but it's incredibly powerful once you start integrating it into your play. Do you guys utilize this? I stick mostly to single player so I'm not aware of the meta-strategies that people are using.

Cheers,

Sedghammer

Up next - "The population management tool hidden in the Empire Summary screen that hardly anyone knows about"

Why research techs *at all* before you absolutely need and can make use of them right away?

It's definitely an old known exploit, the main issue here is that tech costs doesn't get updated until you finish the turn, meaning that if you research more than 1 tech in a single turn, you'll only pay the same rate of Science inflation on all the techs you get that same turn, the intended behaviour being that the costs should increase gradually by the science inflation factor, even while researching several at once.

I think this is even known by the devs, one other way to exploit this is to stop researching anything and let your science reserves fill up, and research several techs in the same turn, I think that's why they added a cap at 2x your production per turn on said reserves.

As you've said, it completely breaks the already unpolished game, so I just avoid using it entirely, one possible way of fixing this would be to make early game techs worth researching right away, but both the clogged tech tree, badly balanced system improvements AND Oracle of Science make this exploit way too good, and I've given up on seeing the tech tree being redone in vanilla, so maybe they could fix the price update bug.

The first I had heard of this idea was from one of 4x alchemist videos where they discuss their idea of "tact" ... which i loosely translate as tempo. It basicly mirrors your idea that you should never finish a tech until you are able to use it. I cant recall if he ever explicitly talks about the science gains as clearly as you did, but he was obviously aware of them from my perspective, and encouraged similar strategy. 

Great information though. Thanks for clarifying why their "tact" game theory has merit.