In the PC game Civilization IV players take control of civilization races, and through a progression of time from 4000BC to 2050AD, the player aims to develop this civilization and win the game by any of the pre-defined 6 victory methods. One aspect of the game is technologies that act as prerequisites for actions the civilization can take. This article describes the calculation needed to determine the cost of acquiring a technology. Included in this calculation is a modifier that is dependent on the number of known civilizations (with respect to the player’s civilization). How the modifier affects the overall calculation can be modeled with network theory.

According to the article, the speed at which the technology can be researched is dependent on the number of known civilizations who have the technology compared to the total number of civilizations that started in the game.

Tech Known by Civilizations modifier = 1 + RDDW (0.30 * # known Civs who have the tech / # of Civs who started the game

This can be reflected as a star network where the player’s civilization is the center node. The power of the player’s civilization in this network diagram can be reflected in the $1 game that was taught in class, with each node only capable of performing one successful trade (which is an accurate representation since once a civilization acquires a technology, it cannot acquire it again). As the number of nodes added to the stat network increases, the amount of money the center node is able to extort out of the outlying nodes increases. Similarly, as the number of known civilizations who have the technology increases, the ability for the player’s civilization to research the technology increases since it is expected that this civilization would have an easier time learning the technology when it has more sources it can draw from (though this dynamic is not explicitly shown in the game). Unlike the $1 game representation, the benefits each node gains is not an actual dollar amount. The value for the player’s node (center node) is an assessment of the civilization’s ability to research a technology while the value of the outlying nodes represents the ability for the other civilizations to prevent the player from acquiring the technology.