TECHNOLOGY (v2.0)- hosted by SnowFire

[Alexander's Horse]

I would like to see techs being more double edged in their effects i.e. having good and bad effects. Most technology is like this.

[Flavor Dave]

Alexander's--you know, when I first was playing Civ, that was one thing that hampered by gameplay--I was thinking like a true postmodernist, thinking that new knowledge was double edged. But then I made the conceptual leap to realizing the tech tree isn't about KNOWLEDGE, it's about WHAT YOU CAN BUILD. Then, it became clear.

Perhaps the designers of Civ3 could avoid this problem by just being straightforward--instead of discovering ceremonial burial, you just learn about the power of the temple. And you don't discover currency, you just learn about marketplaces. IOW, you cut out the "middleman" of the tech, and go straight to what the tech *does.*

For myself, I don't really care. But there are a huge number of posts on this thread, and others, that would be eliminated if they did this.

And this ties in with what Icedan is talking about above. Add in my idea of having "minor techs" or "applications" or whatever you want to call it, that would add 10% to food, or happiness, or whatever. Then you could just make your advisors better. The military guy would say something like--"Sir, our attacking units are high quality, but we need better defense." That tells you to research feudalism, or later, gunpowder.

Also, another advisor could talk about city management. I think the Elvis guy should do this. He's still mostly talking about happiness, but he also is talking about food, pop. growth, and pollution.

[SnowFire]

Icedan: I think the closest we can come to that is the Blind research, or the Blind Research Ratio. To do what you're talking about would require a human game-master.

Flavor Dave: Well, not all techs would give you something under the system in number 5. Many would be there strictly for flavor and as pre-reqs.

I updated the summaries to include Ecce Homo's idea on usage, my idea on Minor Nation tech bleed, Octopus's idea on Technology Horizons, Q Cubed's suggestion on the future techs, Spartan's idea on technology research, and various other odds and ends. I'll add more as soon as I can.

Again, I suggest you head over to <a href="http://www.firaxis.com/ubb/Forum9/HTML/000027.html">Firaxis</a> and post there.

<font size=1 color=444444>[This message has been edited by SnowFire (edited June 24, 1999).]</font>

[NotLikeTea]

I've been thinking about the Sioux and technology. The Sioux did not invent the steam engine, or guns. By civ terms, they were a major failure.

On the other hand, they did not invent these tings because they did not need them. Necessity is the mother of invention. In Euroasia, the competition and frequnet wars probably speeded the rate of invention. Resources are also important.

It would be nice if this could be implemented, somehow. An isolated nation would probably research millitary issues slowly, not because they can't, but because they don't have to. In Civ, all civs develop at roughly the same rate. This is not quite right...

Of course, I have no idea how to implement this, since unlike real civs, the player KNOWS that war will eventually come, and knows in 2000BC that they will have to build a spaceship in the future.

[Icedan]

SnowFire, what do you mean? Why would it be so hard? I don't understand...

What I was saying leads to what NotLikeTea just said before, There's not much feeling of NOT knowing what its going to be like in the future. It SHOULD be unknown, unexpected, unexplored, etc, this is probably what makes going into space so exciting in the first place!

Please add this to the list. It would be a great loss if it wasnt in Civ3. I reackon.

[Alexander's Horse]

Another pet hate: the science adviser is hopeless. If you want to lose, follow the Build/Research advice the machine provides.

"All in all, your just another brick in the wall".

[SnowFire]

Of course, Icedan- that was a comment as a contributor, not a thread master. It's in there now, and actually you're right, it's a workable idea. The question is, how will you differentiate it from the "Categories" idea without making the categories what the problems are? Do you want to differentiate them?

In any case, the summary's been updated, along with other various odds and ends.

[Icedan]

I think I'll leave that to Firaxis or anyone else who can come up with something! hehe

[SnowFire]

Double Post, sorry.

<font size=1 color=444444>[This message has been edited by SnowFire (edited June 28, 1999).]</font>

[Alexander's Horse]

There is a drive in human affairs, largely unrecognised in Civ, that when someone or a society is doing something really stupid they are desperate to ensure that noone out dums them. Example: Apple's business strategy vs. Microsoft on licensing their system....the rest is history. Or Russia/Germany industrialising without social reform: "Germany went to war because its political structure was feudal and its economic base was industrial, please discuss", the favourite WWI exam question.

This could also be a feature in civ.....goes to my earlier point about tech being double edged. It is already covered in the sense that if you research techs haphazardly you fall behind in the science race. But what if the wrong combinations of techs set off catastrophic economic/social/political consequences? That could be fun......

[Theben]

I was going to suggest allowing multiple areas of research, but I'll just throw my support behind it.

[korn469]

ok here's an idea i don't know how it will work or if it could, and it might be completely stupid but here it is.

ok each age has certain techs you need to actually have the age. i heard that the idea for the steam engine was invented in rome, but i know that the romans never developed the infrastructure to take advantage of that idea. here's what i'm proposing.

ok you have the tech tree and it has a bunch of techs that represent ideas. like ideas, about math, that leads to ideas about physics, that lead to ideas about gravity, to lead to ideas about relativity, however they are just ideas. there is no buildings or units associated with them. however their are ideas associated with them that could lead to application of these ideas. each one of these applications will have a building or a unit, or some special ability assoicated with it. these applications techs are all dead ends. the other prerequist would be the technology that defines the age. maybe have five technology enabler techs to each age. every single application in each age would have one of it's prerequists be one of the enabler techs. i'm not sure if the enabler techs should be dead ends or not, or if they shoul even be normal techs but something else.

here's an example of what i'm talking about.

you discover the optical theory it's an ancient discovery...but the ancients had no application for it...in the renasanse(sp?) they have an aplication for it. and that is the telescope observatory, then in the industrial ea, the have no applications for the theory, and in the modern era there is an application of the theory that lets lets you build a fiber optic computer network.

with the enabler techs it would be the underlying factors that created the era...like for the industrial era it could, the assembly line, division of labor, and a few other pertinant techs, techs that would tell why a car could be built in the 1900's and one why the ancinet aztects couldn't build a bmw even if they had the blueprints for it. maybe these wouldn't be techs in the traditional sense, becuase your scientists could discover them...but instead certain events would trigger them. like once you started generating a certain amount of trade AND you had had discovered paper, that the random event of the realization of capitalism would occur. capitalism in the industrial age would then underly applications of mathematics like banking and the stock market

it would definantly require multiple research areas...at least research into theory and applications

tell me if you understood that

korn469

<font size=1 color=444444>[This message has been edited by korn469 (edited June 29, 1999).]</font>

[NotLikeTea]

This is a good point, but I don't think it's workable, or valuable.

Take optics. We could discover it in the past, with no effects, and have it enabled in the future. But what is the point of the ancient discovery, then?

Civ treats techs as technologies, not ideas. Optics the idea would be ignored, but optics the technology (the application) would be used.

[korn469]

well optics would lead to other ideas

i don't know how to format text so i can't do a diagram but lets start out in the industrial age

you would have a certain number of techs (lets say 5) that would enable industrial age applications of the tech you have and will discover.

so electricty is an idea tech in the industrial age, it is a prerequist for semiconductors and it has two indutrial age application, and one modern age application associated with it. the first industrial age application is light bulbs...this gives you a new kind of worker (like a technicain turning into an engineer in SMAC) you need the industrial age enabler tech invention for it to work. the other industrial age application is the telegraph. this increases trade among all of your cities you need the industrial age enabler tech transportation for it to work. in the modern era electricty has the modern age application electric power. this increases the amount of resources all of your workers produce when there is an electric power plant in the city. this requires the modern era enabler tech corporation for it to work.

note i'm not refering to civ2 techs i'm just giving an example. maybe instead of researching application techs as long as you have the enabler tech then the application works. so if you were a renessance era civ and you stole electricity unless you had the enabler techs invention, transportation, and corporation electricty wouldn't do anything for you. and maybe the enabler techs aren't researched but they are triggered. like if you have a certain amount of techs and the right circumstances then you get the enabler techs. so calling them techs is a little misleading.

so here's how it works you resarch idea techs normally, they have a tech tree and each idea tech has certain application tied to it. the application doesn't work unless you posses the enabler for each era. the enabler is like a tech but instead of being researched it is triggered by a certain set of events.

advantages...even if a backward civ stole some advanced ideas from your civ they wouldn't be able to translate these idea into weapons or whatever. and with the enablers being triggered it's add a bit of strategy trying to set up the right circumstances for the industrial revolution to happen, then just rbitraily discovering a tech that starts it. i think it'd be more fun this way.

korn469

<font size=1 color=444444>[This message has been edited by korn469 (edited June 29, 1999).]</font>

[Flavor Dave]

Korn--maybe I'm not quite grasping the idea, but my take is like NotLike's--it seems like you're just adding techs without affecting gameplay. The advantage you cite could be taken care of by fixing the tech trading/stealing of the AI, which I think we all agree is silly. A civ that hasn't discovered automobiles really shouldn't have tanks.

But let me suggest something that may actually go more with Radical Ideas. Let's have the application of theoretical techs be triggered by something other than other techs. One suggestion would be that a tech would lie dormant until the Inventor figures out the application. At any given time, you have up to a half dozen theoretical techs laying around, waiting to find apps. There is a random chance of your civ coming up with an inventor to discover the application of the theoretical tech. This Inventor would be more likely to pop out the more you devote to science, in ancient times more likely for every library you have, in later times, it would be universities that would boost the chance of the inventor. This could be kinda fun, too--"Thomas Edison finds a use for electricity, invents the light bulb." "Thomas Jefferson discovers a use for democratic theory, writes the Declaration of Independence." Even cooler, the inventor should "live" a while, and come up with more stuff. And, he should live in a particular city. That would be fun.

Another idea is to have necessity be the mother of invention. With navigation, you can build Magellan's, but you can't build caravels until you either have a city on another continent, or a trade route with another civ. (How to handle one continent worlds??). You have universities, but you can't build them until you have at least 5 libraries. You can't build explorers until you have MPE or know the location of an AI city. Stuff like that.

Thoughts?