TECHNOLOGY (ver 1.4) - hosted by Shining1

[the Octopus]

I had intended to put my summary into sections, and improve some of the wording that I know is insufficient. SnowFire, if you don't want me to do that for you, or if you have some specific requests, I will be happy to honor them. I feel it is my obligation to leave the thread in a relatively orderly state, and I don't think my current summary qualifies for that. I would do this updated summary either tonight or tomorrow.


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FORMER TECHNOLOGY THREAD MASTER

[Giant Squid]

What about techs that you don't need? You can't just skip a tech in Civ2 if you don't feel a need for the products; you need virtually every technology to advance further. If the tech tree branched out into many smaller parts, then you could have a chance to either A) pursue pure knowledge and advancement all the way through, or B) Stop a while to focus on a few applications.

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Invertebrates of the world, UNITE! Don't just be a bunch of spineless....ah....never mind
<=O=&gt=E

[Alexander's Horse]

There should be more "double edged" techs. For example discovery of the religions and political ideologies should have benefits but also trigger revolutions and civil wars and maybe lead to the birth of new empires and the disappearance of others (through city defections on a broad random scale). Discovery of firearms/cannons should trigger a higher likelihood of warfare etc. Some techs should be more valuable than others for trading i.e. you can trade them for more than one tech.

[EnochF]

Travathian: Or you could settle for a Ringworld, or you could construct a Kemplerer rosette, where worlds are organized in a system where they orbit a common center of gravity. (Just kidding. Building a Dyson sphere... that's projecting almost a million years forward in technology, way too far for a Civ game.)

Okay, let's see. Wakeways. First of all, this requires the designation of space lanes in the solar system. Basically, small probes "seed" the space lanes with fuel. Special ships are constructed which act as sort of primitive ramjet craft. Once a wakeway is established, the craft can quickly speed along to its destination. It's a strategy for keeping the cost of spacecraft at a tolerable level.

Personality constructs are just what they sound like. They're essentially SimPersonality. They're a perfect (or as the case may be, moderately imperfect) simulation of a human personality as a piece of computer software. There's a primitive ROM construct which makes an appearance in Neuromancer. More perfect personality constructs are a staple of Iain M. Banks novels, including Feersum Endjinn. The philosophical hiccough is this: if your personality construct lives on after you die, are you still alive?

Exobiology need not be completely useless. After all, the conditions of primitive Earth have been observed in the solar system, and we yet may find exospecimens under the ice sheets of Europa or growing in the thick mists of Titan. We're not talking Alien Autopsy here, but the study of microscopic alien life in highly controlled circumstances.

Nevermind xenopsych for a while. It shows up in my modpack in order to make interspecies ambassadors possible.

Shining1: WTF yourself!

[EnochF]

Harel: I agree 100% with Ballistics. This should make Ballistae and Catapults possible. Much better than getting catapults with "Mathematics." I don't remember Euclid ever laying siege to Ancient Greece...

[Francis]

Re: Gateway techs.

This seems like a great idea. I like increasing the beaker cost for techs past the gateway unless you've achieved the gateway. How about upping the shield cost for units or improvements you don't have the proper tech path for? E.g., Manhattan project gives you the ability to make nukes, but if you don't have all the advances to have built it yourself, it's harder to build the bombs. This would help restrain the free-spirited nuking of the AI. And I think it's realistic--Pakistan found it easy to get nuclear know-how, much harder to build the bomb because it lacked industrial and scientific infrastructure.

My example is nukes, but I believe it widely applies. You could tell the Yanomamo how to build a tank, but it would take them virtually forever--and it would be more efficient to continue fighting with bows and arrows. You can tell Russia about banks, a stock market, and a free market, but look how long it's still taking to set them up. (Maybe the effects of improvements for which you don't have a complete path are limited, too--if you haven't got whatever comes before university, its science mulitplier is halved.)

Going even further, what if SOL government switches carried their own penalty? SOL communism enables units to only make ONE citizen content. SOL fundy would have very low unhappiness levels, but unhappy citizens would go immediately to double unhappy. Both these modifiers might reflect a people "unready" for the imposition of that form of government.

The "gateway tech" system would place much more realistic constraints on the application of knowledge in the real world.

[Shining1]

Okay. Please calm down everybody.

I've been extremely busy over the past two-three days (I forget how long its been). The summary I posted was meant to be extremely brief - I had and have no intention of railroading discussion on such a diverse thread as this.

As such, the summary included only the main points so far as I saw them (since I can't view them any other way...), and included NO technology ideas (these were going to be in the second half, but I got kinda sidetracked by real life for a bit.

I've emailed Snowfire telling him that if he wants the job of technology threadmaster, then I'll be happy to bow to him. He is, apparently, Octopus' first pick for the job anyway - given the excellent work Octo did on keeping the ideas in this thread coherent, I trust his judgement.

Incidentally, this thread was established to continue the river of ideas for this subject after yin locked the version 1.3 thread - I'm a bit sorry this hasn't happened. Politics aside, I view this as probably the most crucial thread we can produce with regard to suggestions for improvements over the CivII and (somewhat lamentable) SMAC systems (though the techs themselves were almost uniformly excellent).

Right. Now to view the damage to my other thread in my absence.

Shining1

[Shining1]

Trav: I think there was a physics masters paper recently that 'proved' dyson spheres (ringworlds?) are inherently unstable. It comes from gravitiational wobbles caused by the matter in the star not behaving completely like a point particle.

It's a really cool idea, I know. I'd like to see it in A game, but CivIII definitely lacks the scale to include it. Maybe you should hold off until yin starts assembling a list of 'suggestions' for SMEG (Sid Meier's extra game).

Shining1

[Harel]

The gateway idea is a very good idea, but i have been thinking. If you stole space crafts and computers ( the modern era gateway ) you should understand how to build space crafts, even if you are in the middle age level? Unrealistic.
I suggest that you can only get, by trade or stealing techs you can NOW research, meaning those that are one step above your current stage.

[Shining1]

(Reposted from the Civilisations thread)

Minor techs:

A second list of technologies, distinct from the main tech tree in two ways: the player cannot research them directly; and each tech is a deadend addition to a tech on the main tree.

I quoted the longbow example before - I'll use it to illustrate the example below.

Minor discoveries are kind of the aftershocks of a discovery, representing the fact that some cultures took ideas to a higher level than others. When a major tech is researched, there is a small chance that the player will receive a minor tech addition to that tech in the time between the inital discovery and the next major discovery. For instance, you discover 'archery'. You get bows, and you can build an archery range addition to your barracks. These are the benefits of the major tech. Every culture can research them and build the resulting units/components/structures/addons/etc.

The player then starts researching the next tech - call it currency, say. The player then has a chance to discover the longbow minor tech at anytime between the discovery of archery and the discovery of currency. It's a random event, more than anything else.

The advantages of minor techs are:
1) Interest -- you don't get them every game.
2) Tradibility -- since you can't actively research all of them, you'll nearly always have something to trade, even with a superior culture.
3) Historical immersion -- they add an even greater depth to the historical aspects of Civ, by including important discoveries that don't make the main tech tree.
4) Less stagnation -- if it takes you 20 turns to research a tech, you have a very good chance of picking up the previous discovery's minor tech too.
5) Civ differentiation -- an option to automatically give minor techs to the civilisation that discovered them in real life - for instance, the english ALWAYS get the longbow minor tech when they discover archery, while other civs have only a small chance of discovering it.

By this means, you can create a unique aspect to each civilisation that doesn't influence game balance to any great extent, and doesn't imply that one race is superior to another in any area. You also avoid the problems with having a naval civ (viking) being unable to use their advantage because when landlocked. But the potential advantage is still there.

How this helps. It's an interesting idea, it covers a lot of bases, and it makes for a good way to make unique, historically accurate civs without creating massive balancing issues.

Shining1

[don Don]

The major plot element of… cripes, I can't remember which one, the second or third Ringworld book… was that rings and spheres aren't in "orbit" around the star because there is no net gravitational attraction between star and ring/sphere. Simple geometry, actually. Niven kicked himself for not realizing it himself (a friend had pointed it out after Ringworld came out).

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*a friendly note from your favorite heretic

[Harel]

How about a theortical / pratical tech sepperation in the tech section?
I mean, assign a certian % to theortical research, and the rest to pratical tech.
Theortical study will include the tech themselfs, however the pratical is the one who gives you the real things: buildings, units, wonders... Once you gain iron making, you can find the pratical use "swordman" ( or just sword as a weapon in a workshop ).
This will also include the minor techs. You can't ever really decide what is more important: you need the pratical uses, ofcourse, but you need the theortical study first.
My second suggestion is that you will only be able to obtain, by trade or stealing, the theortical research, and learn the pratical uses yourself. Also, you need to be at the same era as the tech ( for example, even if you obtain tanks tech, a middle age empire could never understand the pratical building of tanks till the modern era ).
Also, it will be the theortical tech that effects the culture as I suggested in previous posts ( the discovery should give a small bonus to the related section: Masonry should give a +5% to building, etc. ).

[SnowFire]

Due to changing circumstances, I have agreed to thread master this thread. Please head over to <a href="http://apolyton.net/forums/Forum28/HTML/000089.html">Technology 1.5.</a>

--Thread Closed--

[This message has been edited by SnowFire (edited May 27, 1999).]