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[DEPRECATED] Learn From Other Civs

I'm no longer maintaining this mod and likely won't even respond to comments here. This game option (and many more) is maintained in my flagship mod: DB's Civ VI Gold. Unsubscribe to this and subscribe to that.

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Jan 28, 2021 - Learn From Other Civs was updated significantly, but not here. The new version has a more sophisticated and nuanced system of determining how much to learn from each civ. PLUS it gives you notifications at the end each turn telling you how much sci/culture you learned and each civ you learned it from. PLUS it marks each tech/civic in the tech trees whenever another civilization has completed them.

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Tl;dr
Your civilization's science/culture output gets a bonus when you are researching a tech/civic that you've seen in another civilization. You get a larger bonus if you have Diplomatic Visibility on them (e.g. spies, embassies, etc).

Motivation
Consider: the most helpful knowledge for researching something like, say, gunpowder or democracy, would be knowing that it exists and seeing it in action somewhere in the world. And seeing it in multiple nations gives you more ways to learn about it.

Back when I first played civ (Civ 2) there was an option to trade technologies. When I first did it, I was annoyed because I would trade Nuclear Fission to the friendly AI for gold or something, but then all of a sudden the whole world knew Nuclear Fission, because my friend traded it to all the other comps.

After being annoyed, I realized that's pretty much how life is. It's not like America horded airplane technology for themselves. Once the Wright Brothers figured it out, the media showed the pictures and within months the whole world was flying.

Since Civ 6 doesn't have the option to trade technologies, I figured this was a decent approximation to that concept.

Details
The bonus only triggers if (a) you have met the other civ and (b) if they have completed the thing you're researching. You don't get any bonus if you live on a continent where no one has used gunpowder (e.g. North America before Columbus).

If you've met all the civilizations and they all have the tech/civic you're researching, your science/culture is boosted by 200% (i.e. tripled) while researching this tech/civic. So that's the worst-case (best-case?) scenario. You've met every other nation, and they all have Pottery. When you see it in marketplaces all over the world... it's not going to be too tough to figure out the technology for yourself.

Now if only half the other civs have the tech/civic you're researching, the boost is half as much (+100%)
A quarter of your opponents ==>> +50%
One out of 8 opponents ==>> +25%
If no one has it yet ==>> no bonus
If you haven't met the civs that have it ==>> no bonus

Furthermore, the bonus that a civ gives you is 25% higher for each level of Diplomatic Visibility you have on their civilization. (Diplomatic Visibility comes from delegations, embassies, traders, spies, alliances, and the Printing Press technology.) So if 1 opponent out of 8 has the tech/civic you're researching, and you have Open level visibility on them, you would get a +37.5% bonus instead of +25%.


My intention was to include multiple factors for the extra bonuses. I was going to give weighted values to each of the following:
- Declared friend
- Open borders
- Joint war together
- Defensive Pact
- Alliance Level
- Trade routes
- Delegation
- Embassy
- Spies
- Diplomatic Visibility

However, Firaxis gives modders very limited access to that data in the gameplay lua scripts. (Most everything is available in the UI lua scripts, but this is a gameplay script since it actually gives you science and culture.) The only thing from that list that I had access to was Diplomatic Visibility level. Fortunately, that does subsume some of the other options (trade routes, alliance, delegation, embassy, and spies) so it's fairly decent... but that's the best I could do.


If you want to alter the amount of the bonus the crucial variables are right at the top and clearly marked. Just open the lua file in a text editor.