TECHNOLOGY(v2.1)- hosted by SnowFire

[Maniac]

The research system I proposed a few days back sucks. Since you can build a Library/University/Research Lab in every city, this is a serious pro for using ICS.
Before I throw the whole idea out of the window, what about this?
For a library to have effect, the city must have size 4. For university 8 and for Research Lab 16.

[SnowFire]

Too late. It's in. Talk to yin if you want to remove it... you can look at the summary on the main page, and send us both corrections to the part I added for your suggestions...

[amjayee]

hi

I've been reading ideas sent here and combinining them with some of my own. What do you think about this kind of system? I think it combines quite well most of the suggestions made here. I'll try to summarize it briefly.

Part One: The Creative Energy

1. Concept of creative energy (CE)
Instead of using old "light bulbs" or "beakers" as units of science, let's use certain abstract amount of creative energy. This simulates the fact that the humans tend to use part of their energy to create new solutions to older problems, to entertain themselves and others, create beatiful things, to search the meaning of life etc.

2. How to use the CE?
The use of CE also solves the problem how to simulate the cultural/religious part of human civilization. Certain part of CE will be used for each of these:

-creation of new information (science)
-entertainment and creation of artworks (culture)
-fulfilling the people's spiritual/philosophical needs (religion)

If the living conditions aren't sufficient and the people aren't guarded well enough, some CE will be used for

-rioting and rebellious actions

Some of it will go to waste, of course. This way, all three can be treated in the same way. This is discussed later in more detail. This also holds the key for simulating the unhappiness of the people, I think. Of course the CE should be only one part of it. The goal should be, that all three, science, religion, and culture, are needed. Player's score should be affected by the level of progress he has made on these fields.

NOTICE:
By using this system, the older specialist system is not necessarily needed. What do you think?

3. What kinds of things affect the amount and distribution of CE?
-Some base amount of CE created by certain amount of population should be determined. This simulates the fact that the people cannot be stopped from using their creativity. (Well, perhaps except if they are kept in slavery.)
-The size of the city puts certain limits to how the CE can be used: in smaller cities, the religious needs come first, then comes science, then culture.
-Also, some social matters affect the total amount: how hard the people need to work, how controlled the society is, how the people are encouraged to use their creativity, what's the cultural environment the player creates; this could be done with SE. Player could use sliders to control his society. The properties of the society decide the total amount of CE produced.
These should, though, have only relatively minor effect. This simulates the fact that the government can't very efficiently guide the people's minds. It can only create an environment, where the CE is used.

4. How to make the most of the CE?
If the city has an academy/university, the CE is much more efficiently used for science; they are places where educated people gather to learn more and to meet other educated people. Similarly, theatre/concert hall boosts the cultural life, church/cathedral religious life. This should be the principal means of controlling the CE. Another important means should be funding: the player should budget some of his incomes to science, culture, and church. The goal should be, that all three of these need to be funded, and there should be also other expenses: military, infrastructure, governmental, social, etc., so it wouldn't be possible to put 70-80 percent of the money to science, like in former civs.

That was my suggestion for CE system. It still needs more thinking preferably by other people than me; obviously I cannot see all the flaws it may have. Perhaps it could be enhanced with some ideas of other people.

Part Two: The Development

1. The concept of development
When something is done for a long time, it will be done better and better; that's called development. This applies to everything.

The development should be divided to appropriate fields.

2. Cultural development:
Culture includes sculpture, visual arts, drama, music, literature, poetry, cinema etc.; the more CE is used to exercise these arts, the better they will be mastered. I suggest that each one of these fields will be given a "skill". The skills need to be "invented". For example, when writing has been developed, eventually someone starts to write poems; to achieve this, certain amount of cultural CE needs to be used. Skill of poetry is invented; As time passes, and more and more CE is used for poetry, that civilization's skill of poetry increases. There should be some limitations to prevent the skills being increased too high; for example, the amount of libraries you have puts certain limitations to the skills of written arts. Also, when you have reached certain skill level, you need to spend certain amount of CE to preserve that level. If enough CE is not available, the skill will get worse. This way, the cultural development is dependent on your development on other fields. Of course, the cultural information should spread among civilizations in contact with each other quite freely. This simulates, quite realistically, that the civilizations close to each other will be culturally quite similar. I think that like this the cultural life can be modelled pretty well.

3. Religious development:
The religious system is little different from the others; there are no "skill levels" or such; There is only an overall figure of "religious activity", RA; the more the player gives power to the church, and the more he funds it, the more CE is used for religious work. Certain amount of CE would be needed to maintain current level of RA, if more is used, the level will raise.

The RA count will be used to determine the role of church and its effect on people and society; Very religious people is easy to convince to go for "crusades" against the "pagans" of evil civilization x. If certain religion is powerful, it will spread to other civs, making certain influence on their religious life, eventually causing them to believe in the same way as you, giving you possibility to gain certain level of control of their civ without needing to conquer them.

But, the more the church has power, the less you have it; there should be also some disadvantages for being very religious. Quite obvious consequence is the stagnation of science; the concept of "heresy". Also, the church will probably take some authority from you. These are visions; this is what it could be like. Of course certain theological information could be researched, too, as science; monotheism or polytheism, cult seremonies, dogmatic clashes, etc.

4. Scientific development:
Information should be divided to theoretical and applied - science and technology. Technology is knowledge about how certain thing is done; science is knowledge about why that is possible. Deeper understanding leads to better technology, and so on.

Scientific information could include:
-natural sciences like mathematics, physics, biology, medicine
-human sciences like philosophy, psychology
-economics
-geography
-history
-military science (tactics): infantry tactics, cavalry tactics...

Technological information could include:
-military technology like sword making, cannon making, machine guns...
-transport technology like shipbuilding, airplanes...
-agricultural technology like farming, domestication...
-community technology like road building, sewer building...
-etc.

My idea is, that each of those fields would have a certain value: scientific fields would have a certain level of knowledge, technological fields would have a certain level of skill. The higher the value, the better you understand the mathematics or the better swords you can make.

When the skills are used, some CE will be spent to achieve better and better results. Once a certain level of skill is achieved, some CE will be needed to maintain the skill. If you don't build ships for centuries, it will be hard to start over again.

Scientific knowledge increases in the same way, but much slower; however, scientific information won't disappear as easily, but it is more dependent on written information; if the libraries and universities are destroyed and scientific work is not continued for some decades, the information will start to be forgotten quickly.

The key element of this system is, that there are many smaller fields of information, and they are all developed simultaneously. You don't need to spend centuries to discover "the ultimate sword"; even the most primitive swords and firearms kill people. Instead, you learn quickly, what a sword should be like; then you will slowly learn to make better and better swords. This gives small bonuses to your troops using swords as weapons.

Certain revolutionary ideas make rapid changes in science and technology. Newton's laws caused great progress in physics. Damasc steel gave the sarasenes great advantage during crusades. Let's call those advances "milestones". Most advances used in former civs go under this category. Those ideas cannot be kept secret very well; the news about the breakthrough travel quickly to other civilizations. However, the civilization to reach the milestone first should get some kind of bonus. After some time the others could get a bonus, too, but smaller. Example: civilization x develops damasc steel. This causes dramatic enhancement in sword technology and gives the civ x a 10% additional bonus for their swordsmen. Civs y and z hear quickly about the advancement and learn the secret, too. After some turns they will get a 5% bonus to their swordsmen, but the civ x still has a slight advantage.

5. How this system works?
In order to learn the secrets of certain field of information, some requirements need to be met: for example, to learn how to domesticate horses the civ needs to have some experience on domestication of other animals. Also, supposing that there would be special resource on the map, horses, one prerequisite could be that player has wild horses on his area, or can acquire horses elsewhere. For scientific information there could be some "infrastructural" prerequisites: in order to research philosophy, you need to build at least one academy etc.

When the prerequisites are met, certain amount of CE would be needed in order to find the new field of technology. The amount of CE needed shouldn't be excact, but a value "betweem x and y", and when the total amount of CE is between those values x and y, there would be each turn a certain possibility to make a breakthrough. This would create an element of randomness, which add realism. Especially with the milestone ideas this simulates the fact that often great geniuses make the final effort to combine the information properly.

When the new field of information has been found, certain amount of CE would be needed to advance in level: when certain progress has been made, some CE and perhaps some practical exercise is needed to maintain that level; for instance, if you spend X turns not building any ships, your shipbuilding skill goes down. One prerequisite for progress on certain field could be certain progress on some other field. This is how it has been in our world, too.

The produced CE should be distributed 1) depending on how much the skill is used 2) with some random factors thrown in 3)the player could choose how to emphasize the development; when certain level of excellence is reached, the player would choose to slow down the development on that area and emphasize some other area. On scientific fields, player's funding and emphasizing should be most important factor.

The information "leaks downhill" from civ to others; this means that if civ x is better shipbuilder than the others, the shipbuilding skills of civ y make certain progress because of the "leakage", depending on the connections between those two civs. Usually there is no way to prevent this, and the system should be, that it wouldn't even be wise. They get some of your technology, and you some from them. This also makes the differences between civs smaller. Not fair, perhaps, but realistic. The exchange of scientific information should be much more effective; the scientists from different countries have always cooperated. The progress on scientific fields should be so difficult, that the cooperation would be indispensable. This would add realism.

In the modern world, perhaps after some milestone has been reached, you could build secret labs and make certain information "classified" to make the leakage smaller. By using espionage it shouldn't be possible to steal the whole technology the others have; You should order your spies to "infiltrate" other civilization and use many turns to slowly raise your own level of skill; each turn there would be a possibility that other civ's counter-espionage units notice your actions, depending on their espionage skills.

The good sides of this system are guite good realism and versatility; you don't need to spend centuries to gather a large enough pile of information to be able to build frigates; instead, you can slowly enhance your skill and make your ships better and better. Also, you can research many fields simultaneously.

The bad side is its complexity; but if the system is created skillfully, the hardest part would be to balance the system and synchronize the techs. What do you think? Is it worth the trouble? Think about it and make your own suggestions. Can it be made better? If we can agree on the system, the next job would be to make a list of scientific fields, technological skills and milestones.

I have used ideas from many people for this system. I will not list all of them, partly because I don't remember all and partly because it's impossible to tell who invented which idea first. It's a creation of all who have written to this forum.

[Cosilongo]

An idea that might make the games more varied is to separate ideas/discoveries and the development of these into technologies. So
for example your civilization might invent the wheel (idea) which would then give you the option of developing the horse and cart, and then the chariot (technologies), if you had also had the idea of domesticating the horse. Ideas would pop up at random, but developing technologies from them would cost science points. Ideas would also spread to other cities that trade with a city in a civilization that has that idea. There could possibly be a philosopher that you could have in your cities to increase the probablility of having ideas (similar to the scientist,
axman and entertainer in Civ2). This approach would reflect the situation where some isolated civilizations did not invent the wheel. It would also have an interesting effect, creating varied games - imagine how a game might turn out if nobody invented the wheel until quite late in the game.

There could be some city improvements that would increase the probability of having an idea.

Resource squares could be hidden until you have the idea that relates to that resource (e.g. iron does not appear until you have had the idea of iron working). This would prevent the placement of cities deliberately near to resource squares, and would allow the possibility of advantages of city placement changing through time - a city apparently in a poor place early in the game might turn out later on to be near to good supplies of coal and iron.

I think there needs to be a more intuitive technology tree, so that it is reasonable to guess what kind of benefit you would get from a technology. So odd things like labour union allowing you to build mechanised infantry would not exist. Otherwise there is dditional work for the player to do working out what technology to develop, as you have to look them up in the civilopedia all the time, which slows down the game.