Official: Next Tech

[Method]

i got the choices by holding all our units and skipping ahead till we finished social psych. i hope you dont consider that playing ahead. anywho, the choices for our next tech are:

• Doctrine: Mobility - Command Center, Speeder (M2), Leads to Doctrine: Flexibility, Doctrine: Loyalty.
• Secrets of the Human Brain - Hypnotic Trance, Fundamentalist, first faction to discover gains free tech leads to Neural Grafting, Centauri Empathy
• Industrial Base - Synthmetal (D2), The Merchant Exchange, leads to Superconductor, Polymorphic Software, High Energy Chemistry, Industrial Economics
• Applied Physics - Laser (A2) leads to Nonlinear Mathematics, High Energy Chemistry, Optical Computers

You have 5 days.

[Method]

since this isn't the first post, i'm allowed to post a biased answer

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...52#post1274552 this is the thread showing how UNLIKELY it is that we will get secrets first.

[MrWhereItsAt]

Technically it IS playing ahead, TKG.

An alternative is to look at your tech poster (I am facing mine now - scary innit? ) and figuring out, from the techs you have, which you have the prereqs for.

We have BioGen, InfoNet and CentEco, working on Social Psych.

Once we have SocPsy, we will have prereqs (if any) for
Applied Physics
Industrial Base
Secrets of the Human Brain
Planetary Networks
Ethical Calculus
Doctrine Mobility


which is a few more than what you got.

Thus playing ahead has mattered here. If we don't know we couldn't get some of these, we can best decide what to vote for. However, without knowing what we do now, we would vote for whatever we liked from the whole list of things we SHOULD be able to research. I don't see very much of a difference, but in future maybe we should just consult the tree,...?

[DeathByTheSword]

agreeing with MWiA here

[Gyromancer]

The problem here is that age-old political science problem of setting the agenda for a vote. Suppose that 75% of the electorate want a tech that is peaceful-growth oriented, and there are four on the big list that are equally good. Also suppose that the other 25% want a conquer tech, and one really cool one shows on the big list.

What happens if you run the vote off the big list and then when the short list shows up there is only one of the growth techs on the list? only 18% of the voters chose that one, while 25% of the voters chose the conquer tech.

I think that if you dont play ahead to see the choices of tech (which may not be accurate if we pop a pod for a tech in the meantime....) you really need to phrase the poll in a way that takes into account the "big picture"

For example, make multiple polls: (these are simplified, but you should get the idea....)

#1 conquest/defense vs builder tech vs SE tech vs pure sci tech

#2 Choose favorite c/d tech from available ones

#3 choose favorite builder tech

#4 choose favorite SE tech

#5 choose favorite pure sci tech

Of course some techs will show up on multiple lists. (so those diehard warriors will still have something to vote for in the builder tech poll..) In the end, it is a representative democracy, so the representative has the final say in interpreting the results. (Which could still be ambiguous...) If the people don't like how he is doing, they can always vote to get rid of him.....

[MrWhereItsAt]

We need a second choice poll, or take the one with the second highest votes in the case the preferred one is absent from our choices.

In the Civ2 game (where of course not every tech we can get is guaranteed to be available at any time), we polled on a tech path, and had a backup. That way polling could happen once and last several turns easily, and we would have second choices that were nearly certain to arise.

[Diablero]

I want to stress the importance of being ahead in technology to anyone who hasn't yet voted.

Vote for the Secrets!

[Maniac]

Going SotHB will actually get us behind in tech as some AI will probably already research that tech in the 2130's, denying us the Secrets bonus.

Vote for the Industries!

[Method]

Originally posted by MrWhereItsAt
Once we have SocPsy, we will have prereqs (if any) for
Applied Physics
Industrial Base
Secrets of the Human Brain
Planetary Networks
Ethical Calculus
Doctrine Mobility


which is a few more than what you got.

this what happened in the last poll (the one that got closed ). most people voted for psych, but it would not have been on the list of available techs after ecology, so i repolled it. if we had gotten to the point where we had to pick, and psych wasn't on the list, then what would we have done?

Diablero-secrets is NOT a good choice . with -1 efficiency, what chances do you think we have VS the university, or morgan?

EDIT: MWIA, read your most recent post. are you saying that we should do a second poll with the complete list? if you are, i agree

[Diablero]

I'm willing to admit the flaws in my argument.

What happens if there is a tie?

[moomin]

Tricky, this one. Oh well, voted.

[MrWhereItsAt]

Originally posted by TKG

EDIT: MWIA, read your most recent post. are you saying that we should do a second poll with the complete list? if you are, i agree

Yes indeed I am.

Isn't it great when the Bureaucrats all agree on something productive?

[History Guy]

Let's see...my personal opinion is that it'd be highly unlikely that we'd get Secrets of the Human Brain first, so I'd suggest that instead we try for Industrial Base. This will give us Synthmetal Armor, which I calculate would make a nice addition to our armory, as it is, after all, of a much better quality than what we have right now...which is nothing...And it would certainly do very well in defense and offense. I think we should try for it.

[Mr. President]

I say Industrial Base, as the pre-requisite for an industrial economy.

[Method]

excellent choices, both of you. now, if only people would stop voting for secrets