Repeatable confusion

[chromy]

I noticed Spies/Treason shows up as 'Not repeatable':

I guess the situation is a bit complicated there as iirc Spies can only be researched once whereas Treason can be researched multiple times. Then I noticed that many of the castle techs (conscription, hoardings, etc) claim to be repeatable:

When I don't believe they are. Initially I thought the sense of the boolean was swapped but then looking more I found cases like this:

...so now I'm just super confused about what the meaning of repeatable is. I had a quick look at generateDataFiles.py but I didn't have my install of aoe2 on this machine to debug further.

[HSZemi]

Oh, hehe. So, a bit of history:

1. Modders make 3x / 9x / 256x tech mods where you can research (most) technologies multiple times in a game
2. AoE2 DE somehow breaks them, especially the 256x tech mods
3. The developers implement an event cheat called "going above and beyond" which natively turns on 256x tech mode
4. The developers make that generally available in the game

There are technologies that do a one-time thing which cannot be applied multiple times. Examples are things like Age-Ups (no need to research Feudal Age multiple times) or Ballistics (which just turns a certain behaviour on). Those were not multiplied in the original 256x tech mods, and are also only available once with the cheat. The repeatable flag on a technology determines whether this technology can be researched multiple times with the cheat or just once. This can also be used in random map scripting by modifying the ATTR_SET_STACKING and ATTR_SET_STACKING_RESEARCH_CAP values of a technology.

Now. Treason is something completely different. If I remember correctly, it is not actually a technology, but works more like some kind of Patrol command.

[HSZemi]

Sample

[chromy]

Ah ha! Thank you 😄 That makes a lot of sense - I just didn't make the connection to Nx tech mods at all.

Thanks for the detailed explanation! :)