Question folks, I am trying to get the pacing of the game to change by changing the rate at which new techs are learned. I want to drastically slow the game down. Far far far slower than putting the pacing of the game on very slow. Basically, I want it to take upwards of 1000 turns just to hit age of war in techs, and 5000ish before anyone is hitting age of ascension and another 5000 turns before hitting age of victory.

It has always irked me how fast 4x games all tend to progress on the research side of things.

Now, I setup a mod file for this purpose and originally tried to just alter the PacingDefs.xml file only to find it had no result.

<PacingGroup>
        <InternalName>ResearchRateOptions</InternalName>

        <Pacing>
            <PacingType>VerySlow</PacingType>
            <Stats>
                <EffectType>Research</EffectType>
                <Scope>Global</Scope>
                <Target>
                    <TargetType>Colony</TargetType>
                </Target>
                <BonusType>Multiplier</BonusType>
                <Value>-0.5</Value> <!-- this is the line I tried to change changing value from -0.5 to something smaller like -0.7 -1 -10 and even -1000 -->
            </Stats>
        </Pacing>
        <Pacing>
            <PacingType>Slow</PacingType>
            <Stats>
                <EffectType>Research</EffectType>
                <Scope>Global</Scope>
                <Target>
                    <TargetType>Colony</TargetType>
                </Target>
                <BonusType>Multiplier</BonusType>
                <Value>-0.25</Value>
            </Stats>
        </Pacing>
        <Pacing>
            <PacingType>Normal</PacingType>
            <Stats>
        <EffectType>Research</EffectType>
        <Scope>Global</Scope>
        <Target>
          <TargetType>Colony</TargetType>
        </Target>
        <BonusType>Multiplier</BonusType>
        <Value>0.10</Value>
      </Stats>
        </Pacing>
        <Pacing>
            <PacingType>Fast</PacingType>
            <Stats>
                <EffectType>Research</EffectType>
                <Scope>Global</Scope>
                <Target>
                    <TargetType>Colony</TargetType>
                </Target>
                <BonusType>Multiplier</BonusType>
                <Value>0.25</Value>
            </Stats>
        </Pacing>
        <Pacing>
            <PacingType>VeryFast</PacingType>
            <Stats>
                <EffectType>Research</EffectType>
                <Scope>Global</Scope>
                <Target>
                    <TargetType>Colony</TargetType>
                </Target>
                <BonusType>Multiplier</BonusType>
                <Value>0.5</Value>
            </Stats>
        </Pacing>
    </PacingGroup>

Next thing I tried was to go through and change the costs of each tech directly. I started with the AltarianTechDefs.xml tree first just to test things out. When I try to start the game I get the following error:

C:\Users\REDACTED\Documents\My Games\GalCiv3\Mods\ExampleMod\Game\AltarianTechDefs.xml(553,41): error:
value '2346000' must be less than or equal to maxInclusive facet value '2147483.647'

I'm assuming "maxInclusive facet value" indicates a maximum numerical value I can assign for a research cost? If so, is there a way to increase this cap? Basically to change the research values, I have gone into the tech tree and started by multiplying research point costs by 10,25,50 and 75 for the different layers in the starting age. Then I use a multiplier of 100, 250, 500, 750 for the age of war techs, a multiplier of 1000, 2500, 5000 for age of ascension techs, and a multiplier of 10,000 for the age of victory techs. This results in the most expensive age of victory techs needing close to 100,000,000 research points to complete.

I'd still much rather achieve the pacing change by changing how fast/slow the different pacing options are. So if anyone knows why trying to mod PacingDefs.xml didn't work that would be excellent as well.