Tech web?

[onodera]

Has anyone seen it on a screenshot? To me it sounded like a regular tech tree, except you have three(?) ultimate techs to which all other techs lead to. Instead of starting at the left side and progressing to the right, like in Civ, you start out in the middle and progress outwards, favouring one of the directions, so your knowledge is literally pear-shaped.

[Nikolai]

No screenshots of it has been released yet.

[Lorizael]

I haven't heard anything about ultimate techs related to the affinities, but that does make some sense. What they've said so far is that the further down a particular path you go, the more of a particular affinity you take on. I don't know if that means certain techs open up particular stages of an affinity, or if it's a cumulative effect based on the number of techs down a certain path you've taken.

[Guynemer]

Or possibly having hybrid affinities.

[onodera]

I let my imagination run wild and came up with this fantasy of a tech web (see pic). Everyone gets the starting tech and one of the six bonus techs around it. To tech further, you need two adjacent techs of the same level or level-1, so you need 31 techs to beeline to one of the ultimate techs (warp gate, transcendence and whatever the supremacy get). I wonder how close the real web is to my fantasy. Gosh, I am so excited. Yeah, I have no idea where the alien contact tech should be.

[Lorizael]

We've never seen that much interconnectednes in the tech tree before. But this is a brave new world we're entering here. I thought I read somewhere--maybe the PC Gamer interview--that there were something like 6 different directions that branch out of the web, and that the web isn't completely determined by the affinities.

Here we go...

David McDonough: The web represents the frontiers of science. Your culture can embrace any part of it on the way to where it's going. You can say that the strong arms are, off to the left there's alteration to the human form, so cybernetics, human augmentation, surrogacy, putting your brain in a can, that kind of stuff, that's where transhunanism shows up. Near it is artificial intelligence, super advanced computing, artificial sentience, robotics, machine life and so on. Then there's information and communication sciences, so lots of orbital stuff, data collection storage and analysis. Imagine a world run by the unholy alliance of Twitter and Wikipedia.

PC Gamer: Oh god.

David McDonough: Another analogy would be the Hitchhiker's Guide, data flows freely and the Purity player will find lots there, like human archivism and holding onto what came from Earth. Next to that is planetary sciences starting with alien fauna and alien geology and then moving onto terraforming, all the way to the point of planetary engineering where you can dig into the mantle and mine rare ores right out of the lava. Or you can build machines that shake the very ground under your enemies and stuff like that.

Above it is genetics, starting with what the human genome is and what the genome is we find on the alien world, and then extrapolating, blending them, hybridising, breeding new life, reverting humanity to an earlier genome stripped of all its flaws, like the promethean idea of the ultimate idea of human, and then in between body modification and genetics are the xeno-sciences, about the alien world you find, things that are unique about the Miasma, the alien ecosystem, the bizarre resources you find and what that means for new technologies. You'll get some combination of those, maybe about 75%, and you can decide which one's the most important to you. Whatever you want to do, those techs are how you do it. They're the engine of the game.

[Lorizael]

Interesting news about the tech web:

http://gamecrate.newegg.com/civilization-beyond-earth-interview-developer-designer/

“There are no pre-requisites,” David explained. In Beyond Earth you really WILL have the freedom to move laterally through the tech web however you like, though technologies that are further out from your starting point in the center will cost more to research.

[Lorizael]

I haven't heard anything about ultimate techs related to the affinities, but that does make some sense. What they've said so far is that the further down a particular path you go, the more of a particular affinity you take on. I don't know if that means certain techs open up particular stages of an affinity, or if it's a cumulative effect based on the number of techs down a certain path you've taken.

According to this interview, you have a certain number of points in each affinity. Looks like points are going to come from quests and techs, at least. What we don't know is if there's a point at which you're fully one affinity and not the others, or if there are hybrid affinities, etc. You have to commit at some point, I imagine, because the aesthetic changes based on your affinity (like when you reach a new era in Civ, I imagine), and because 3 of the 5 victory conditions are tied to affinities.

I used the word point in two different ways in this post. I'm a bad person.

[self biased]

it would be interesting to see what would pass for social policies be like a secondary tech tree/web.