Technology Model 7

[LDiCesare]

Yes, I know about doing it on a per civ basis, but this will be needed when the early tech tree is done, because, as I've said elsewhere, I expect that some techs will not start at zero, to give some moderate amount of knowledge to beginning civs, while keeping "minor civs" a bit further back (or at 0 on those techs).

No. As stated elsewhere in one of these Tech threads, tehcs are supposed to all start at 1.0 when they become active. So it's not needed.

[demipomme]

With respect to the gain of technology from adjacent nations would it not be more realistic to gain a technology rather than RPs? For example a neighbouring nation may have exactly the same technology exept their chemistry is higher and so they have gunpowder. If the recipient nation is getting RPs then they would get advancement across the board rather than an advancement in chemistry. Perhaps in this instance, the recipient nation could get gunpowder without the prerequisite chemistry level? This would progress slowly until their chemistry caught up, but it would at least give them a fighting chance!

It may also be interesting, and perhaps more realistic, if a prerequisite level of a vital tech is needed for a particular technology to advance. For example maths of 4 is needed for engineering to exceed 6. This would model the importance of fundamental mathematical theories such as trigonometry, without which engineering could not have progressed.

Is there a spreadsheet with tech tree as it stands, grouped into their respective levels? If so is this online somewhere so I could have a look? Cheers.

[LDiCesare]

There isnt' a full tech tree. Maths are already accounted as helping physics through the helper techs thing, and we added a minimum requirement for a tech to become active, so you could have physics 3 and maths 3 required to research engineering 1, with maths further helping physics (which means lwo maths level hurts physics research).
To explain thequite harsh "not needed" above. I ment that there are active techs at 1, and inactive techs, so an inactive tehc is as if it were 0.

[LDiCesare]

Originally posted by alms66:

I’d like to request a change to the events output window. I would like to see all the entries of the form:
“x has reached level y.”
removed from the output. It’s overly distracting/annoying when you have a scenario with 20+ technologies and growth has gotten to double digits, because you end up with 10+ such entries every turn. Quite frankly, with the new 'application available' entries, I just ignore them anyway.

(...)

Maybe I’ve missed something in the tech model to infrastructure model interaction descriptions, but I think we’ll need to add another tag to the technology structure in the XML file, as an example, I’ll use the plow. (...) Why not name the levels of farming and have one of them named ‘plow’? This way, instead of seeing “Farming has reached level 0.5”, you’d see “Our farming technology is advancing! We have discovered the Plow.” Obviously at .1 increments, there would be far too many levels to name individually, so we’d only define major levels (and only display those major levels in the events output), like so:

code:
<technology>
<name>Farming</name>
<tier>3</tier>
<growthrate>1.0</growthrate>
<upkeep>1.0</upkeep>
<helper>
<name>Agriculture</name>
<requirement>0.0</requirement>
<effect>0.5</effect>
</helper>
<naming> *Start of new stuff
<namedlevel>
<level>0.5</level>
<name>Plow</name>
</namedlevel>
</naming> *End of new stuff
</technology>

This looks good; though I would put the Plow in your example, because I don't think one would say "you have discovered the gunpowder" but "you have discovered gunpowder".
There could even be a civilipedia tag and when you click on the message you get a bigger description based on that additional tag.

[alms66]

There is one major consequence of this that everyone must understand before we do it though. Instead of having hundreds of technologies throughout the game, we'll probably cut that down to a few dozen by naming levels like this - just making that clear. We can tweak the growthrate and upkeep globals to suit because growth will definitely need to be slowed in this approach.

For those that want to see the original post and the explanations it contains.

Also, when this is implemented, we need to have the string that will be displayed in the output editable in the xml file.

[Mark_Everson]

I think that the "plow as a level of farming" idea is ok, and could streamline things a lot. But I'm not sure that having everything like plows handled that way is desirable. We'll just have to look at these things on a case by case basis. For now it seems like a good simplification of the model.

Rather than completely getting rid of the tech messages I propose that if there is more than one that we just bundle them in a "Technology Advances" item in the message box. If you were interested then you could click that item and see the details of what was advancing as is normally shown now.

[alms66]

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
Rather than completely getting rid of the tech messages I propose that if there is more than one that we just bundle them in a "Technology Advances" item in the message box. If you were interested then you could click that item and see the details of what was advancing as is normally shown now.

You're probably right on that one. But, if we're going to do bundling now, we may as well do it with everything (Riots, New Application Available, etc.) to streamline the interface a bit.

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
I think that the "plow as a level of farming" idea is ok, and could streamline things a lot. But I'm not sure that having everything like plows handled that way is desirable. We'll just have to look at these things on a case by case basis. For now it seems like a good simplification of the model.

I actually see three completely different approaches to the tech tree being viable (and desirable as well), once that is implemented. For this example purpose I'll label them 'Simple', 'Moderate' and 'Complex'.

The Simple approach would involve taking the 6 tier one techs and putting all tech growth as incremented (labeled) development of one of those 6 techs. So for the entire game, you only have 6 techs to worry about. This would be useful in scenarios where technology growth is not extremely vital, such as a war scenario where time is measured in days or weeks, rather than years - mainly due to tech growth being so linear with this approach. It’s also ideal for those who don’t really care about the tech model or just want a quick game (as there’s much less interaction needed with this approach).

The Complex approach would mimic exactly what the tech tree does now by simply not making use of the label tag at all. This will essentially be the simple approach, with all labels turned into full-fledged, defined techs, meaning there will be hundreds of technologies to deal with. This would be useful in full-history scenarios for people who want extremely long and richly detailed games. This would probably become my own personal standard.

The Moderate approach would, of course, be somewhere in-between the two extremes. It would probably quickly become the 'standard' for most people. It would have approximately the same number of techs as the Civ series, with some labeling (incremented techs).

And, of course, we could always have a game setting that allowed you to play any of the three tech tree approaches in any scenario, depending on your preferences, allowing players to over-ride the approach defined for the particular scenario. Just as you can choose various “rule” options in Civ3, you'd be able to choose 'Simple', 'Moderate', or 'Complex' tech tree options in Clash.

So I’m thinking that the best approach would be to tackle the simple tech tree approach first. There’s much less work involved, no current scenarios could be considered ‘tech-vital’ except Dawn (perhaps, and I suspect none will be until we get some diplomacy going as without diplomacy you're limited to war scenarios), and once it’s complete it would be extremely easy to convert to the complex approach. I suspect the moderate approach will end up being the most time-consuming and difficult to complete, which is reason enough to save it for last. I may be wrong about all of this, and I’m just guessing at it right now, of course, but any input or feedback on that would be appreciated.

[Mark_Everson]

Hey Alms:

Your analysis sounds reasonable to me. I think that the simple system has the danger of having "huh?" moments for players like FE Legions being buildable before iron working or such. Maybe I'm being unduly sceptical. But I'm certainly interested in seeing if the simple system can be made to work.

Tackling the simple one first does sound right. In terms of your specific assertion that Dawn would be the only one to be tech-vital, I'm not so sure. But I know that will become clear as you move forward. . .

[yellowdaddy]

Is there anything here about how techs are achieved/acquired?

[Mark_Everson]

Hi yellowdaddy. Richard put pretty good synopses of the system at the beginning of each major step of model development. Read his post(s) at the beginning of this thread to see how techs turn on. If the synopsis in this thread isn't adequate try the Demo 6 tech thread that is linked to in his first post in this thread.