Alternate reality mod?

[Lancer]

We all know that iron makes swords makes swordsmen leads to capturing cities. However as the civs progressed irl they had no such knowledge. Though this problem is somewhat helped by having resources pop up upon the discovery of the tech that uses them just having the knowledge of how to apply that resource to the benefit of your civilization is unrealistic. In order to make a game truly historical we the players can not have a knowledge of how history will unfold. So, I was thinking that resources should pop up based upon the sci evolution of the game but that in each game that resource should apply to a different ability.

Hmm. I'm not really happy with that either. Can anything be done with this idea? I'm just too fuzzy minded today.

[Jaybe]

If one had no control of what is researched (blind research), it wouldn't matter, would it?

Sorry for not quite being on topic.

[Lancer]

That's true. That's an important part of the game tho isn't it?

[WarpStorm]

Blind research was a major part of SMAC. You gave the general type of research you wanted your scientists to research and you got what you got. This made for a more interesting dynamic than being able to plot out your research at the beginning of the game.

While not blind research, the early Civs only allowed you to pick from roughly half the available techs. This meant that you knew generally what was coming up, but you sometimes had to wait on a key tech even once you had all the prerequisites. I found this to be an interesting dynamic and would like to see it return in a future installment.

[EternalSpark]

Ugh, I hated blind research. I'm the player, I determine my research. So glad it never got picked up in the Civ games proper.

[TriMiro]

Blind research is a potential disbalance of the game. Blind research depends possibly too much on luck.

I see that my opponent has Bronze and I do not have it. I would research either chariots to stop a possible axe-rush or go for iron to get axes of my own. If I have no control over that I am in a very bad position. Imagine I get several religious techs in a row, and stay undefended... restart game.

I am not sure how the balance of SMAC worked, but blind research would remove an important part of the strategy planning.

[joncnunn]

In SMAC, blind research wasn't completly blind, what you actually did was pick among 4 categories (and could pick multiple) and then the tech you got was random based on how those techs fit into the categories. (which was actually technically a weighting with most techs having weight in multiple categories). There was also a bias towards techs with fewer prereqs than more.