It has bothered me since I started playing that both of these are so alike, except of course that residential leads to larger costs in food. I was thinking that perhaps one could change the max percentages slightly, to make them a little more separated in terms of how the market produces and consumes them. Perhaps this could be encouraged by only a slight shift, say up the max for resi to 190%, and nerf the busi to 170%.

sounds interesting to make the usage a bit more different

Last set in Express I couldn't give away my business tech for free but my residential was selling at 25 -40% above the average. My guess was that there was quite a number of GS going on and countries wanted to boost their population.

I ended up stopping bus production and for a while I was only teching res and still couldn't keep up with the demand. Leave it as is.

i don't see how they're alike, other than having the same max/min points.

the techs are certainly complementary, but not necessarily "the same"

most skilled netters will tell you that you typically don't want to buy 50% of each tech the entire round.

If your goal is to maximize your dollar per turn then you wouldn't want to be 50/50 on the tech as well as the buildings either. I think they are quite different. One boosts business and one boosts your population. Both have an impact on your dollars per turn however both impact in different ways.

I didn't say there's no differance at all between them. But at large, you tend to buy fairly equal amounts of them. I believe it'd be more interesting if people tend to get more of one first, then progress over to the other one. The relative difference in alliance for total bought/sold right now is less than 2%, as compared to almost twice as much agri, and being about one hundred times as that of med tech. Avg price is also almost the same, as compared to 3,843 for agri, and 2,422 for spy (being top and bottom).

Good Max Price Min Price Avg Price ▾ Total Sold Avg Sold Trans
Business $6,999 $300 $2,944 6,240,784 2,169 2,877
Residential $6,999 $555 $2,935 6,141,617 2,203 2,788

the difference between buying even amounts of bus/res and buying the optimal amount of each will probably have less than a 200k nw impact on a country that can finish above 200m nw :P however, i don't see any reason in changing the max values of the techs, seems pointless

Resi tech does have some benefits, namely it increases population slightly to make the country a litter harder to kill. I see no reason for a change.

Also, civilians increase networth a little.