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I had something of a thought on technology, trade and resources, you can read through the following semi-coherent post or skip to the semi-coherent (but shorter!) summary below.
It would often be desirable, to give another faction some of the benefits of a technology, without actually giving them the technology, there are numerous reasons one would want to do this, from being stingy to not trusting the other party to being greedy and wanting to milk them off all their worth.
So the idea is to have resources you can build and sell, which are made available at certain tech/tech levels, these resources could be called "Tech Goods" as they are tied to certain technologies. As an example there might be:
ElecGoods lvl 1,2,3 (electronics, computers, software)
BioGoods lvl 1,2,3 (drugs, organisms etc)
WeaponGoods lvl 1,2,3 (blow stuff up, etc)
Tech goods would become available at certain technologies, or combination of technologies, as a rough guide, the lvl1 good would become available approximately 1/6 of the way up the tech tree, the lvl2 about 3/6 and the lvl3 at 5/6.
To construct the goods would require resources and metal, like to construct level1 goods might require 10 metal + 100 production, the 2nd lvl 25 metal + 400 production.
Things which can be built would have resource requirements:
Sludgegun: 2xWeaponGoods1, 1xBioGoods2, 50 metal, 400 production.
A race with the technology to build lvl1 WeaponGoods and lvl2 BioGoods would be able to build the Sludgegun normally, the citizens automatically construct the extra goods required, so the cost would also show as 95metal/1000 production.
A faction without the technology would only be able to build it if it has the required units of weapon and biogoods in it's stockpile, and it would not be able to build these goods, it would have to beg, buy or steal them.
Goods would serve two purposes, trading partial technology and resource stockpiling, like say you want to build some nuclear missiles but dont have the warheads, you could build the propulsion and materal components in advance, then "assemble" the nuclear missiles when you aquire the warheads.
The system of tradable goods would allow for some great strategies, like focusing entirely on one arm of the techtree and relying on trading your high teched goods for other factions goods, such a strategy incurs great risk because the other players might be able to resist the alure of the high tech goods, leaving you in a bad position, or another player might decide to simply blackmail you for the goods rather than buy them. The main advantage is it makes a tech lead a very valuable resource, which effectively can be traded without comprimising the tech lead.
It would allow for very lucrative alliances where each player takes half the tech tree and they trade the goods, such alliances should even flourish in highly competitive games (altough both players will probably research the weapons technology... for when the alliance is broken)
However note that the system also gives imperfect trade, not all components will be able to be built using goods, so an alliance each taking half the tech tree, wont be able to build as much stuff as a single faction that has the entire tech tree.
With respect to coding, I think the easiest way is to allow an effectively unlimited number of goods to be defined, the first few will be basic goods, like food, metal etc that can be produced or mined easily, a goods definition would go something like this:
Code: ANTI
Name: Antimatter
Tech Pre-req: Energy 21, Elec 18
Facility Pre-req: AM-PP
Cost: METAL 10, PROD 400, ELEC3 1
It would often be desirable, to give another faction some of the benefits of a technology, without actually giving them the technology, there are numerous reasons one would want to do this, from being stingy to not trusting the other party to being greedy and wanting to milk them off all their worth.
So the idea is to have resources you can build and sell, which are made available at certain tech/tech levels, these resources could be called "Tech Goods" as they are tied to certain technologies. As an example there might be:
ElecGoods lvl 1,2,3 (electronics, computers, software)
BioGoods lvl 1,2,3 (drugs, organisms etc)
WeaponGoods lvl 1,2,3 (blow stuff up, etc)
Tech goods would become available at certain technologies, or combination of technologies, as a rough guide, the lvl1 good would become available approximately 1/6 of the way up the tech tree, the lvl2 about 3/6 and the lvl3 at 5/6.
To construct the goods would require resources and metal, like to construct level1 goods might require 10 metal + 100 production, the 2nd lvl 25 metal + 400 production.
Things which can be built would have resource requirements:
Sludgegun: 2xWeaponGoods1, 1xBioGoods2, 50 metal, 400 production.
A race with the technology to build lvl1 WeaponGoods and lvl2 BioGoods would be able to build the Sludgegun normally, the citizens automatically construct the extra goods required, so the cost would also show as 95metal/1000 production.
A faction without the technology would only be able to build it if it has the required units of weapon and biogoods in it's stockpile, and it would not be able to build these goods, it would have to beg, buy or steal them.
Goods would serve two purposes, trading partial technology and resource stockpiling, like say you want to build some nuclear missiles but dont have the warheads, you could build the propulsion and materal components in advance, then "assemble" the nuclear missiles when you aquire the warheads.
The system of tradable goods would allow for some great strategies, like focusing entirely on one arm of the techtree and relying on trading your high teched goods for other factions goods, such a strategy incurs great risk because the other players might be able to resist the alure of the high tech goods, leaving you in a bad position, or another player might decide to simply blackmail you for the goods rather than buy them. The main advantage is it makes a tech lead a very valuable resource, which effectively can be traded without comprimising the tech lead.
It would allow for very lucrative alliances where each player takes half the tech tree and they trade the goods, such alliances should even flourish in highly competitive games (altough both players will probably research the weapons technology... for when the alliance is broken)
However note that the system also gives imperfect trade, not all components will be able to be built using goods, so an alliance each taking half the tech tree, wont be able to build as much stuff as a single faction that has the entire tech tree.
With respect to coding, I think the easiest way is to allow an effectively unlimited number of goods to be defined, the first few will be basic goods, like food, metal etc that can be produced or mined easily, a goods definition would go something like this:
Code: ANTI
Name: Antimatter
Tech Pre-req: Energy 21, Elec 18
Facility Pre-req: AM-PP
Cost: METAL 10, PROD 400, ELEC3 1
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