Monterce wrote:
It could be quite hard to implement, how do you justify the reason to research new shields or weapons for your ships? You have to be at war with 1 or more races? To research a shield upgrade you have to be at war with a race that uses weapons good against shields?



I agree with you that the tech tree is unrealistic, but to give some boundaries and coherence to the research in a 4x game it is almost always needed. I'm not much into the research bars that gives you a random tech when you reach the end since it gives you no choice.



To use your idea though you could have a tech tree but to get some of the technologies you would need some conditions. Let's say only the social and industrial ones. For example: to research subterranean farms you'd need to have a shortage of food for a set amount of years but to research technologies for war you wouldn't need any conditions. It might be feasible but it would need a lot of work to decide which technology is condition based and which are not.

Yes, this was partially what I suggested earlier on. It might be too much to have a totally reactive or situation-triggered tech tree, but facing, say, ship subsystem failures in and after a battle (regardless of foe) might trigger either autonomously or player-directed research into...say...higher capacity shields, or stronger bulkheads.



Alternatively, maybe it could be research crossover suggestions. To counter an established deficit in, say, starship superstructure strength, the science division might suggest researching "Improved Smelting" or "Nano-lattices" in combination with "Vessel Architecture" or "Enhanced Shipyard Fabricators" (or something), so you're combining complimentary research projects to provide modifiers for starship armour values, instead of simply researching one thing.



This might sound convoluted, but it's more akin to proper R&D and notions popularised by Minecraft, ie, item combination and customisation. Combining "Vessel Architecture" with "Enhanced Fusion Generators" might produce a positive modifier for ship-based energy weaponry like lasers as well as shield charges.



I dunno. Just a few ideas. I like the concept of mixing and matching research, but there is a risk of creating some sort of imbalance.

I kinda like the way MOO2 did research.

Adn how SOTS did research.



Some randomization. Keeps you on your toes.

Maybe, but randomization also prevents you from planning ahead and means that some players will be off worse than others due to something they can't control. That doesn't sound like a lot of fun to me.

Well, MOO2 allowed you to see all the tiers. It was useful when playing uncreative race (Klacklon). Helped to see what techs a sadorandomizer cut you off from and to plan ahead your strategy based on the techs. Usually the first friendly AI you`ve met quickly filled you tech gaps via trade, espionage or combat/scrapping.



SOTS allowed to see only techs that you have access to. No planning ahead making a game a little bit unpredicted and thus forcing a player to adapt. Usually a lack of tech in SOTS meant serious fall behind in firepower, defences or expansion. The abundance of weapons and protection means allowed to go alternative ways. If being very unlucky cut you off of all the useful/high tier techs, than a player was forced to take some extreme decisions from sacrificing research over production or even forcing overharvesting the worlds to get more cash for larger fleets. Techs could be obtained through salvage or incredibly long special joint projects. The first one demanded presence of specialised ships and constant wins/draws with more advanced player. The last option required some bribery and other diplomatic actions to get an advanced player to actually like you enough to trade techs to you.

Armada 2526, which is a fairly underappreciated game, allowed you to view the entire tech tree right from the get go. Based on the screenshots we've seen so far it seems Amplitude is going for a similar approach here.

At the risk of sounding like a major noob, what does it mean by 'appliances'?



Also, with my limited understanding, I think that having multiple tech trees that differ while you specialise in one particular tree (perhaps similar to WoW talent trees) would be good and have certain bonuses or another tech tree (or set of tech trees) that follows the progression concept but would be harder to progress through, give better rewards and is possibly hidden until the required progression point is reached. This is probably similar to option 8 or a combination of options 7 and 9.

Trash, have you read this post of mine? /#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/10985-poll-what-kind-of-research-tree-would-prefer



What are your thoughts about it?



To benzfilth:



Appliances here are the techs themselves that a player could research. For example in Master of Orion 2 your tree was divided into several disciplines (physics, biology etc.). Each of them had several tech tiers/levels that a player progressed on. Each tier had from 1 to 3 techs for a player to choose. This is what being refereed to as appliances. After researching a tech player gained access to a new tier/level. The other techs from the tier he has just researched were lost to him.

benzfilth wrote:
At the risk of sounding like a major noob, what does it mean by 'appliances'?

typically ur washer, dryer, toaster, you know the kind of stuff every superior race needs :P



I mentally subtranslated that into 'applications'. wrong or right it helped me work with it.

Okim wrote:
Well, MOO2 allowed you to see all the tiers. It was useful when playing uncreative race (Klacklon). Helped to see what techs a sadorandomizer cut you off from and to plan ahead your strategy based on the techs. Usually the first friendly AI you`ve met quickly filled you tech gaps via trade, espionage or combat/scrapping.



SOTS allowed to see only techs that you have access to. No planning ahead making a game a little bit unpredicted and thus forcing a player to adapt. Usually a lack of tech in SOTS meant serious fall behind in firepower, defences or expansion. The abundance of weapons and protection means allowed to go alternative ways. If being very unlucky cut you off of all the useful/high tier techs, than a player was forced to take some extreme decisions from sacrificing research over production or even forcing overharvesting the worlds to get more cash for larger fleets. Techs could be obtained through salvage or incredibly long special joint projects. The first one demanded presence of specialised ships and constant wins/draws with more advanced player. The last option required some bribery and other diplomatic actions to get an advanced player to actually like you enough to trade techs to you.

Indeed. The gist is that evne palyer with not much luck with the tech tree still had options. There were alwas ways to deal with your enemy.

I've had some pretty nightmareishly bad rolls for tech in SOTS, but I've never really found it much of a handicap. Sure it means your ships are weaker on a per ship basis.



So I throw more ships in, with a few salvage vessels to get more tech. Easy. Works.

For my part I think that a fixed tech tree, with some differences for each species would be nice. Some requirements for the high grade technologies would be fun too. What I thought about too, would be to make sure you can't research everything so that you have to make decisions and live with it. I think it would make the player more ''aware'' of what technology he wants to go for in the end, let's say for example that you want to go with bacterial and chemical weapons but to do so you have to go all the way down the chemical weapons or industry tech tree but doing so remove the possibility to go to the end of the planet bombardment tech tree. So in the end you have a chemical weapon that uses 1 ship but take 1 month or more to kill all or most of all the population but you do not lose ships to planetary defenses while trying to bombard the cities leaving a large number of the enemy's population still alive. So this was just an example but I think that having the player be aware of the fact that he's gonna have to make big decisions in the tech tree would not only make the player invest himself a little bit more into the tech trees but also make for some interesting battles because two civilizations can go very different ways making them unique.



PS. Please do not use the UI that SOTS used for the tech trees, it was the worst I have ever seen and it always gave me the impression you had researched almost everything already (I know it was not the case but still).

As much as I enjoy tech trees and tech lines, I would like to see a 4X game get away from these arbitrary and unrealistic processes. Instead, technology should become available when certain conditions within an empire are met. Advancement in technology is often the result of need or necessity. At some point, someone had to decide that research on a certain project was necessary for an important reason. I would like to technology in a 4X game based on events and conditions. Let's say a player needs access to X amount of resource Y in order to make a breakthrough in research Z. Or the player's empire needs X amount of population to stimulate research into project Y in order to prevent overpopulation. Salvage of ancient relics is, of course, a great event-based technology boost.



I'm not sure if my idea comes across clearly or not, but I could see this kind of tech system working well in single player. However, implementing it into multiplayer would be more difficult.



Perhaps there could be research progress bars for different fields of tech that constantly move forward unless requirements aren't met. I'm just thinking out loud here, so any help fleshing out this idea would be great.



-Kyle

It could be quite hard to implement, how do you justify the reason to research new shields or weapons for your ships? You have to be at war with 1 or more races? To research a shield upgrade you have to be at war with a race that uses weapons good against shields?



I agree with you that the tech tree is unrealistic, but to give some boundaries and coherence to the research in a 4x game it is almost always needed. I'm not much into the research bars that gives you a random tech when you reach the end since it gives you no choice.



To use your idea though you could have a tech tree but to get some of the technologies you would need some conditions. Let's say only the social and industrial ones. For example: to research subterranean farms you'd need to have a shortage of food for a set amount of years but to research technologies for war you wouldn't need any conditions. It might be feasible but it would need a lot of work to decide which technology is condition based and which are not.

I can totally get behind the idea of a fixed-appliances general tech tree, BUT with a race-exclusive tech tree, also.

The only way to get race-exclusive tech would be by espionage or outright retro-engineering after a battle.



And yes, getting the -whole- tech tree is just too similar to other games...if you choose tech A1 then forget about tech A2 and A3; if you choose B2 forget about the rest, etc. The logical explanation behind this? ("Why would you limit yourself?!" you might ask), well, if you base your whole civilization on Deuterium-powered engines (for example), why on earth would you research and create Hydrogen-based ones? Are you going to dismantle everything you've built for an engine that pretty much does the same thing? No.

If I could design the entire tech tree, I'd like it to be sort of like the following.



All race types get their own tech tree. So machine races, who I'll nickname CPU and GPU would both get the same tech tree. Then the individual races get tech trees, which help make each race unique. This means that CPU and GPU both share the same over all tech tree, which would have a absence of medical technology, due to the fact they are a machine race, and therefore could not get ill. Other races would have their own race groups aswell, so instead of Humans, you'd have Humanoid, and then you select humans from inside that category. Or you could have Reptilian as a race type, and then select Tarka or Xindi or which ever race comes under that category.



This means that everyone's techtree is more or less unique. You could, however, make it so that when you make a custom race, you select your race type, then get a list of traits appropriate for that race type.



That means no Strong Immune Systems for machine races, no matter how funny it could be



Hell, when it comes to custom races, you could select a tech focus of some kind, that unlocks extra technologies in that area. Your race focus's on weaponry? Extra weapons in the tech tree.



But "Mr Caek Daemon, what's to stop people from just picking weapons technology?" I hear you say.



By choosing a tech focus, you reduce the number of tech's that are in other areas. So if you pick offence, you reduce your defensive capabilities. I don't necessarily mean stopping them from getting access to Shield MK XVI, just to cut out gaps in the the tech tree. This means that instead of going from Shield MK I to Shield MK II, you'd skip II and go straight to III, but with a substantially higher research cost. This means that someone who focused on offence will never be truly weaker in defence, they just have to put more effort into getting the same results.



Then with some random tech selecting done, the tech tree is both unique to each race, and unique each game.

Megamaniaco wrote:




And yes, getting the -whole- tech tree is just too similar to other games...if you choose tech A1 then forget about tech A2 and A3; if you choose B2 forget about the rest, etc. The logical explanation behind this? ("Why would you limit yourself?!" you might ask), well, if you base your whole civilization on Deuterium-powered engines (for example), why on earth would you research and create Hydrogen-based ones? Are you going to dismantle everything you've built for an engine that pretty much does the same thing? No.

So I guess that's why there's no research is being done on solar-powered or electric cars....:rolleyes:

I'm not sure if the AI would be able to deal with such complexity as the model is purely set from a player's perspective:



as in HOI2 there are tech teams who reasearch in specific areas

technology advance is divided into theoretical and practical branches



the player can create new tech teams whose abilities in specific research areas are (within a certain range) random but based

on political, ideological, racial conditions and on the investments on education. A team would either be a theoratical or a practical one.



the player assigns such a team to a specific reasearch area, i.e. military, shield technology. The reasearch effort is driven by the specific abilities of the team and the resources put into reasearch. So each team shares a global pool of resources commited to research.



The player determines the broader focus but does not exactly choose what to research, i.e. he directs the general research efforts of the team towards shield technolgy but does not explicitely choose a certain type of shield defence.

The focus is determined by the player, the results are randomized, as an event, as in real life. When such an event is triggered, say the team has had a breakthrough in shield technology, potentially improving shield defneces by, say, 10% (randomized results), the player could then decide to apply the research results by assigning a practical team (or more teams so as to simulate competition) to develop a prototype. The theoretical results also may affect several practical branches so the player could order prototyping for each affected branch. The results of prototyping would also be random based on the ratio achieved in the theoretical phase.

The player has finally the choice to accept one of the prototypes and order it into production.



The theoretical research could also result in opening new areas of research.



This model doesn't need a large tech tree as each node can be constantly improved unless declared obsolete.



Such a model would overcome the typical in the long run boring determinacy most 4x game suffer.

TrashMan wrote:
So I guess that's why there's no research is being done on solar-powered or electric cars....:rolleyes:

Haha, good one. Well, altough you do have a point there, in a sci-fi setting there (usually) is no danger of running out of deuterium, hydrogen, etc. You can just send more cloudscoops to a gas giant or whatever.

The main reason behind the idea of excluding alternative (side) techs (A1, A2, etc) is to make each civ specialize. You could just research the whole tech tree like in every other game, and that is boring and just makes them all too alike.

I always try to win by technological victory So more is better But any kind of tree is acceptable.

No to a tech tree at all.



Technology cannot be simplified into a simple thing like a tree.



It is more of a web, with criss-crossed paths to various advancements.





Starting from a centre point, moving out in an expanding web, with some technologies having multiple prerequisites that must all be met, some which only a few prerequisites must be met (and that then open a backward path to the others prerequisite technologies), some which are just linear progression, some which have prerequisite technologies, but also prerequisite events/holdings, and some of them can have multiple paths to the same technological breakthrough, once more opening up a back-tracking option.



For my crazy example, let's just say the creation of Mass Driver technology is dependent on Miniaturization reaching Pico level, Energy Systems having at least Tera supply level (or Giga level, and high Power Efficiency), Asteroid Harvesting, and Gravitational Distortion... The technology is used to harvest asteroids, refine them, and fire them at ships and planets. A devastating power that requires all of these things to be in place to get the job done.