Standard Clash Tech Tree

[Simon Loverix]

I'm just posting to get notification of post on this thread.

One remark: add an age: 1000-1500 AD: Emerging capitalism. The city-based economy is totally different from the agragian subsistence economy of the Middle Ages.

[alms66]

Originally posted by Simon Loverix
The city-based economy is totally different from the agragian subsistence economy of the Middle Ages.

I agree with this, however, these ages have no effect other than to assist in organization and development of the tree, so I don't really want to go back an add in another age. Besides, I would expect that 99% of players would expect the Middle Ages to be followed by The Renaissance, not Emerging Capitalism.

[LDiCesare]

I'd rather have a list cut by categories than by ages. So I think we should write here which broad categories will be used, which is more or less which tiers we should use: Military techs, Production techs, etc. Knowing that, for ergonomic reasons, it would be good to have around 5-9 (7?) categories so that when we present the main techs to players, they can keep them all in memory at once.

[alms66]

Originally posted by LDiCesare
I'd rather have a list cut by categories than by ages. So I think we should write here which broad categories will be used, which is more or less which tiers we should use: Military techs, Production techs, etc. Knowing that, for ergonomic reasons, it would be good to have around 5-9 (7?) categories so that when we present the main techs to players, they can keep them all in memory at once.

Understandable. However, I'd like to do the tree one chunk at a time, which is why I opted to group them by ages. I will be organizing them into the various tiers as time goes on, as my little notes say (I've started this already, actually). Eventually, I'll aggregate the entire thing into one monstrous tree, which will not be organized by ages, but by category, as you suggest. For now, I believe the current format to be easier, especially for "passers by" who may only be interested in one particular Age.

[Lord God Jinnai]

What are unclassief ones? one you're currently unsure of?

Also you are missing some oritental ones, not many though, but this may be because your using european age system. Nothing wrong with that though as those are just for referance.

[alms66]

Originally posted by Lord God Jinnai
What are unclassief ones? one you're currently unsure of?

Also you are missing some oritental ones, not many though, but this may be because your using european age system. Nothing wrong with that though as those are just for referance.

Unclassified, are as you say.

As for oriental ones, I was hoping you would show up to fill in those gaps.

[Mark_Everson]

Thanks for all the work on this alms! I don't have time too look the lists over in detail at this point. The one general observation that I have is that there may be too many items in your list overall. I know "too many" is very subjective, but my concerns in that area are twofold. There two potential effects I'm worried about are that of an overwhelmed player, and also game balancing of the tech system being very difficult. We will of course see in the future if either of these concerns are relevant.

I don't mean for these criticisms to detract from what you've done. It will be a big step forward to have a working ancient tech system for Clash. Thanks for all your efforts!

[alms66]

In actually going through and working on this for a bit, I think I've managed to come up with a fairly good list for the theory (or Tier 1) techs. I'll list them here, with examples, let me know what you folks think.

Construction (Road Building, Brick Making, etc.)
Communication (Signal Towers, Carrier Pigeons, etc.)
Naval (Sails, Harbor, Hull Making, etc.)
Aerospace (Aerodynamics, Lift Properties, etc.)
Military (Formations, Tactics, etc.)
Economics (Coinage, Caravans, etc.)
Science (Chemistry, Physics, Biology, etc.)
Education (Classical Education, Mathematics, etc.)
Society (Philosophy, Religion, etc.)
Cultural (Painting, Literature, Sculpting, etc.)
Energy (Wood Burning, Charcoal, Peat Extraction, etc.)
Production (Tools, Iron Working, Assembly Line, etc.)
Medicine (Germ Theory, Bleeding, Innoculation, etc.)
Government (Regimes, City Planning, Colonization, etc.)

[Lord God Jinnai]

Some of these would be tier 2 techs.

Naval, Aerospace and the not mentioned Landbound would fall under Transportation. Stuff like harbor should be under intrastructure,

Medicine would fall under biology. Yes modern medicine uses non-biological components as well, but for most of history it hasn't.

Infrastructure would contrain construction and energy

society should be renamed Humanities and culture renamed arts and should be put under group Social.

Also some of your stuff like Iron Working would go under another tier under production, like metallurgy.

[alms66]

Doh!
Transportation, for sure.

Infrastructure is extremely general. Did we really want to be that general at the top levels?

I could see medicine under biology, though I just assumed it convienent, though not completely accurate to seperate it. If everyone wants it under bio, I've got no problem with that.

Science (falling under education), Society, Cultural, Education and Government IMO, could be combined into one giant "Social" tech, I just didn't think we were being that general. Does everyone agree with that?

The techs I listed next to the tier 1 techs, were only a general idea of what type of techs are there, nothing more.

So we have:
Construction (Road Building, Brick Making, etc.)
Communication (Signal Towers, Carrier Pigeons, etc.)
Transportation (Sails, Sled , Hull Making, etc.)
Military (Formations, Tactics, etc.)
Economics (Coinage, Caravans, etc.)
Science (Chemistry, Physics, Biology, etc.)
Education (Classical Education, Mathematics, etc.)
Society (Philosophy, Religion, etc.)
Cultural (Painting, Literature, Sculpting, etc.)
Energy (Wood Burning, Charcoal, Peat Extraction, etc.)
Production (Tools, Iron Working, Assembly Line, etc.)
Medicine (Germ Theory, Bleeding, Innoculation, etc.)
Government (Regimes, City Planning, Colonization, etc.)

I'll make the Medicine, Infrastructure and "Social" tech changes once at least one more person agrees with that approach.

If all changes were in place we'd have:
Construction
Communication
Transportation
Military
Economics
Social
Infrastructure

[Mark_Everson]

One thing occured to me that this thread really needs. For the sake of continuity it needs a link to the old tech discussions so that someone stumbling upon it will know what the heck is going on. Alms, could you please post this link, to the Tecnology Model 7 thread in the first post up top? That thread has a pretty exhaustive set of links to prior discussions. I'll get back to you on your proposals once I've got a clear head to think about them.

[Lord God Jinnai]

one thing...this is in reguards to a previous question i posed...are you going by dates for the earlest time the technology was applicable?

I mean FE beuracracy (close to as we understand it today) then would be a bronze age discovery or iron age at the latest developed by China.

[alms66]

I'm dealing with it on a case-by-case basis really. I don't use any hard and fast rule as to when to go by "first known use" or "widespread enough."

[LDiCesare]

I somewhat disagree with the repartition you suggest.
Construction + Communication + Transportation + Military + Economics + Science + Education + Society + Cultural + Energy + Production + Medicine + Government = 13 which is way too much.
Renaming Cultural to Arts is a must if such a category must exist. Medicine belongs under biology.

To me it looks like the economics branch would be very shallow, as I think there are very few principles and applications in it. Obviously economists know better and would disagree.
Separating education from science might be ok, but separating maths from physics at such a low level is dead wrong to me. Physicists tend to do mathematics work to get their tools and some mathematicians like Poincare did some advanced physics stuff (restricted relativity is mostly math for instance). I'd rather group physics and math together and have biology and chemistry in another category.
So lumping Science and education together is good for me. Lumping Society and Government together also makes sense. Lumping Society/Govt and Science together doesn't seem right to me.
In ancient Greek, the word for art is techne, which spawned technics. I think 'art' should be dumped altogether. Considering that painting is an art is not obvious. Drawing is essential in planning the construction of objects, so drawing is a very early construction tech for me, which allows things like architecture, and many designs. Painting is today a very high tech activity (plane painters are not artists but very very skilled technicians for instance). Again, painting is part of construction for me. So to me, arts are an offshoot of construction, where you use construction techniques to build artistic things (things whose main use is to be beautiful).
I'd rather lump society with economics, because both have an impact on everyday way of life. Consider the Marxist theory, which is a theory lumping together economics, history, philosophy and religion. It would fit well in a Society tier which contains economics. This would make economics a second tier tech, which I'd feel more at ease with. Economics (bartering, using coins) is very linked to philosophy and religion. Some cultures consider that eating what you produced yourself is utterly evil, and so their gift economics system is very linked to their philosophy. The Christian relation to banks explains a lot about antisemitism, since jews could lend with interest rates when christians couldn't, etc.

So to me the first tier would be something like (in parenthesis alms's initial list equivalents):

Communication (Communication)
Transportation (Transportation)
Military (Military)
Science (Science, Education, Medicine)
Social (Economics, Society, Government)
Infrastructure (Construction, Cultural*, Energy, Production)

* Painting has uses in social (artistic painting - mostly religious by the way), infrastructure (painting ships hull is essential), military (camouflageing cars and war paints), communication (calligraphy) for instance. Pottery is also infrastructure more than art, but it's still art in my opinion. As for artistic painting, and music, they are mostly religious things and belong to religion, not a separate category (allowing or banning human representation for example). So if cultural as part of infrastructure seems weird, putting it in philosophy/religion makes some sense too, but remember arts are technai.

[Mark_Everson]

I pretty much support Laurent's synthesis. My only quibble is that I think Cultural should go in Social. At that level of coarseness I am tempted to lump Communication and Transportation into a single item. That would leave a slot or two open if we wanted to re-jigger Laurent's list somewhat. But too much thinking about this at this point seems premature. Eventually we will know what the players do with that interface and we can consider splitting heavily-used areas down to a finer level.