The Price of Progress?

[Azaelus]

Just a quick idea: What do people think of certain technologies having negative effects? Not all progress is good, after all. As soon as they are researched, your entire civilization is affected, possibly by altering the multipliers in the calculations for various things. For example,

Replaceable Parts - increases waste
Mass Production - increases pollution caused by production
Motorized Transportation - increases pollution caused by population

etc.

Good? Bad?

-- Azaelus

[lajzar]

Sounds good. Note that civ2 and civ1 both had increasing population pollution with certain techs.

One change I proposed in another thread is that each time you gain a new tech, you generate 1 unhappiness in all cities for 5 turns. This reflects the citizens' uncertainty in a changing society. Usually, this isn't a serious problem, but if you are a science powerhouse generating a new tech every turn, thats 5 unhappy citizens more than you perhaps want. This was you have a natural limiter on science production that reflects a real aspect of social change.

[Dauphin]

I like the idea of positive, offset by negative, consequences for a tech.

[lajzar]

Just another couple of thoughts on this...

Electricity (or something) should make Coliseums obsolete, and then you have to build stadiums as the modern happiness improvement.

If using boolean tech trees, certain techs should lock out certain others. Forex, getting "blood cult" locks out "way of the samurai" (cultural pathing), and "ironclads" locks out "monitors", "longbows" locks out "crossbows" (limiting you to one of two closely related units).

[chrispieX]

mmm, I'm not sure I like the idea of this. I think ideas should only be introduced if they bring something other than a nuisance or micromanagment along. I agree that there should be some negative effects of tech, it's unavoidable really - industrialization brings pollution for example.

As for the 'one tech making another impossible' idea, well that sounds like masters of orion to me, and I absolutely hated it in that - but I suppose if relagated to stuff that's not essential it might not be so bad.

[lajzar]

Yeah, I would only propose it to non-essentials. There are three broad categories I think it is useful for:

1 - Scenario mods, especially those involving magic (fire magic excludes water magic etc).
2 - Cultural specialisation. Instead of making unique units specific to one civ, make it so that getting the tech (which should generally be a dead end tech) for a UU excludes you from certain other areas that give other UUs.
3 - Similar units with an either or choice. Every culture historically either chose crossbows or longbows as their primary weapon at that stage in technology. Also, everyone chose either ironclads (ocean going, weaker) or monitors (coastal, tougher). Boolean tech fulfills this potential. Of course, both later get muskets and dreadnouhts.

[GePap]

As was stated, Civ2 had those things included.

Certain techs should increase political instability, not just govs. IN fact, all technological progress should cause an undercurrent of "what is going on-why are things changing!". This shou8ld be specially true of things like Industrilization and Steam power.

[Az]

WTF? Another person using a login name similar to mine.

So now we have:

Lorizael.
LordAzrael
Azaelus


goddamn copycats, crampimg my style.

[BigFurryMonster]

Originally posted by lajzar
One change I proposed in another thread is that each time you gain a new tech, you generate 1 unhappiness in all cities for 5 turns. This reflects the citizens' uncertainty in a changing society.

A very good idea! It doesn't even increase the level of micromanagement directly...

[Fosse]

I'm not a fan of unhappiness when a tech is discovered... it can directly effect micromagment, even if it's just jacking with the luxury slider after each tech. Aside from that though, it smacks a clunkyness to me.

I'm very interested in a boolean tech tree that excludes some techs for others. That could really differentiate one game from the next... especially coupled with blind research!

I also like the idea of some things becoming obsolete with new techs. Civ 2 had this with barraks and it was nice and sensible. For many improvments I'm all for just changing the name and leaving the old one in place, so I wouldn't put collesseums on that list. But now I'm just nit picking instead of commenting on the idea, which I generally like.

So, basically... no to increased unhappiness, yes to tech exclusion and possible improvment obsolecsence.

[BigFurryMonster]

If you're going with "blind research", you could make it a research option to either:

1) research a specific available tech at full cost
2) research a random available tech at reduced cost