Research system draft

[Lord God Jinnai]

This was bumped over from another post of mine when i found this thread.

I'm wondering how your going to handle geographic advancement of technologies. For example the americas discovered the wheel, but never implimented in anything more than childrens toys because they didn't have anything like horses till the Euopeains came. Also in Japan they skipped the bronze age and went from the stone age to iron age (although the gap was still around the same size of other countries for those two periods) because copper was extremely rare in Japan.

Also I almost forgot how are you handling the loss of technology over time do to a lower education level of people? This has happened atleast twice on a major scale in our history and it should be implimeted in some way in clash.

[Mark_Everson]

Well, Hrafnkell/Keli (they're the same person) may have different plans but here's my general take on these topics:

On the geographic distribution of technological enablers...
I had planned to use the easy geographic ones. FE if you don't have access to both copper and tin you can't develop bronze working. Horses/wheel are a special case, and I'm just not sure supporting that particular big difference (horses) between old and new worlds is worth all the game complexity that would need to be included to handle it. If we do handle horse availablility then it would be similar to the other materials-enabled techs.

I'm with you on loss of techs being a Big factor I would like to include. I've got two ideas for handling it, there are certainly others.
1) Require a certain education level to use certain techs. When ed level dips below you can't use them. If it stays too low too long then those techs are Gone from your civ and you need to re-learn.
2) After lack of use tech knowledge goes away. This is harder to implement generally since not all techs have an obvious means of use. Perhaps the education and use effects could be merged into a single system.

BTW, If you're interested in helping out in detail on the tech system let me know and we can take it from there. Keli said he will soon have more free time to pursue this, but that he'd welcome some help/new ideas.

-Mark

[Lord God Jinnai]

Tea i'd like to help with the tech part...I'd be better at coming up with techs and their rqs and such than inplimenting the code since the only programming languages i learned anything about were basic, quick basic and the basics or RPG.

I am however very good at the former.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Hrafnkell:

I'd like to redo the tech model with your permission. I'd be using the non-TL and isntead use basically the "Hard" and "Soft" RQs. Also I'd like to add some more futuristic ones, nothing too far out there like Interdimential travel, but stuff that is currently being researched and has shown some possibility of success down the road. I do keep up with this so it shouldn't be to hard to figure out what can and can't be done.

I'll do one anywayz even if you don't want to, i just won't post it. I won't be putting in any "bogus" techs since its still hard enough to come up with enough other techs. I will prob also add a tag "geographical" which basically means you need to be geographically located near a source of relavent material.

Also I'd like to add a new tech group called "Basic Technology Advances" This would incorperate the idea brougght up by Peter. Basically this section doesn't have any new techs, but only adds effecincy to existing ones. It will work (can't remember that name of the curve but i want to say bell curve). Anywayz the level starts out incresing quickly the eff., the slowly tapers off and cost much more to make even a minor improvement. I know there's a point that no improvements can be made, but for right now i'm trying to keep it somewhat simpler. This will of course be modified via new technologies. For example:

Someone learns the tech "Crop Rotation" and dicides to go to there basic technolgies and research "Agriculture" in general some more based on what they know already. They do so and come up with better crop rotations and any other agicultural techniques prev learned. Then at the same time some reasech is put into the development of say "Pesticides" (getting a little out of sinc tech wise, but its only an example hehe). Anyway once that is discovered it resets the curve.

Effiecency in "Basic Technologies" is represented by simply percentages. This is the percentage of effeciency beyond the 100% that would normally be so if no research was spent in that basic technology. Also once a new tech is discovered, i'll use the above example, then the perecentage would be lowered. Agriculutre was originally at 0% then with the investments got up to 20% when the new tech was discovered. The new percentage for Agriculuture would be something like 8%. They still know more about crop rotation, but only the inital about pesticides.

Whew! I never thought I could type so much on one item!

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Now for something totally differnt tech wise.

I think in the begginning technology reaserch should be blind. I don't have an exact date when this should be taken off, but many times techbology came about (and still does often) by accident.

FE: the telescope was inveneted when someone "forgot who" had two pieces of glass set up in such a way that it magnified the object he was looking at.

[Mark_Everson]

LGJ:

Some thoughts until Keli shows up... I'll be brief since I don't feel like typing

Future techs:
IMO the basic game should stick to actual history. However, potential near-future techs could easily go in a mod.

Refinements of techs already had:
I think it'd be much better to just allow each tech to be 'over-researched'. So you would have the tech for 2-field rotation that could be over-researched at any level, but with diminishing returns above 100%. At 200% you might get a 20% bonus. I do like the suggestion in general, but why make it complicated by adding a whole other category? The over-researching also helps a little IMO in modeling a traditional society where they may not culturally want any More tech, but the ones they have are Very refined due to Lots of local trial-and-error.

Blind tech research at start:
I agree its historically accurate, but I think A Lot of people would really dislike it. So IMO it fails the fun test . I think the basic way we have things will make it somewhat harder to direct tech in unreasonable ways as can happen in civ.

[Keli]

I only send this message to say I'm 'in' again. I.e. I'll be watching all threads carefully and hopefully send few myself.

Lord God Jinnai:
Why don't you conjure the bare bones of your ideas onto paper and show them to us. Then we can decide how/if we can incorporate it into the existing model.

[Lord God Jinnai]

I'm working on it now, though it may take a week to complete since I'm redoing from scratch a lot of the stuff. I'm using many of the techs in the outdated, yet still handy tech chart for this. I'm removing much the technologies as I consider them to a> be under my basic research technologies b> I consider them things inherant to people with that level of tech (FE pirating isn't a learned technolgy, the shipbuilding is and pirates, or rather bandits will make the jump to pirating) or c> generally the same as something else...I am also adding and devided some to take care of this lacking in tech so there won't be any shortage.

Also the future techs will as I stated be things currently being researched that have show some hard or semi-hard evidence of success beyond being simply theory in a written form. This means time travel will be out, atleast backwords (i may leave it out all together for simplicity), however, transporter tech of non-living matter is a possibility since last year the first particle was transported across a room. This isn't much, but its more than many considered possible with out tech level. I'm adding these because I always hated ending up with 70 or 80 years of developing "Future Techs" at 1 per turn.

Finnaly to the basic technologies. True it will add more techs, but it will also eliminate many others...you'll see what I mean when its done.

Also there is one section I'd like some help on. The tech levels of art. I am very good at art and also very knowledgable about what is art and its history. I'm just wondering why its listed the way it is since the art styles (with a few exceptions) could have happened in any order. FE a Picaso style painting could've come in the greek era. Also the level of art is also a misleading idea since there is no such thing as "bad" art, just what each person consideres. For these reasons and many others I'm leaving this out unless someone can convince me otherwise.

Just a reminder, I should have it done sometime next week. Don't screem if I don't, I do have school work also. I promise to have it ASAP though.

[Lord God Jinnai]

A small add-on to the post.

Here's the basic way in which the curve would work. This is still considering above 100% norm. 1-20% cost in ponits could be 10x the percentage trying to reach...21-35 15x perecentage trying to reach...36-40 20x the percentage trying to reach and 41%+ double the cost of the previous percentage. This is only an idea and the numbers may be completly off. You can put a cap on if you want, but i think with the setup i have it'd soon get too expensive to continue research anywayz and easier to develope new techs.

Also the reason for adding the new section actually makes it simpler IMO. Here's why: many of the sections will have basic under techs, though not all. This aleviates the need for techs such as basic, itermeditate and advanced (tech name here). It also is nessary, well not nessarsary, but simpler than reaearching each indivisual item in say agriculure you already have learned and instead just improving in general on what u already know. Also each basic tech cannot be researched until a relavant tech has been researched...fe seafaring tech is required for, well, searfaring basic tech for lack of a better name.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Here's an update:

I've done about 100 techs and am prob 1/3-1/2 done with the main techs...no basic ones put in...

Also on the original Tech chart what does "+S" stand for?

[Mark_Everson]

Hi LGJ:

+S = adds sites for economic activity. So drainage +S means you create additional farm sites by draining that square. It will when complete sometimes change the square to another terrain type a la civ.

[Lord God Jinnai]

I'm almost ready to send my technology listing. All of the technologies have been added (over 300) and I'm simply adding the basic technologies now... I've decided to drop the tag levels, though i still use tags and just use a percentage scale for the basic technologies on many of the more advanced technologies. More infor on this when i'm done.

Other than that, it should be done soon, i'd say Monday at the latest...

Anywayz this isn't going to be perfect by a long shot and I also have many futurisitic technologies which may/maynot be agreeble to everyone, however everything i've put in here has some relavence to something being researched currently.

[Lord God Jinnai]

I'm done with my tech listing for now...I'm stopping till I can get some response on it and to take a couple breather days. Anywayz here's the link: http://people.mw.mediaone.net/markeverson/Tech_20.htm

[Paul Crocker]

Looks really good! I haven't delved into it too deeply, but I like what I've seen. I have a question regarding artillery (cannon advance). Since you call it "cannon", I'm assuming that you are referring to older (maybe pre-Napoleanic) artillery? You might want to have a tech called "ballistics" based on mathematics/trig for prerequisites to allow for more advanced artillery. Also, computers could allow for advanced (today's standard) tanks, since what really makes them so much more powerful than their predecessors (as in the Gulf War) is their computer controlled engines and fire-control systems. A BIG leap forward in armor!

[Lord God Jinnai]

Thanks! I'll do that. That's why I put it up cuz I'm not perfect and could use help. Feel free to give me some more help and anyone else too. I'll try to post an update next week.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi LGJ:

It looks good. I have a bunch of comments, but not much time right now, so I'll talk about the one glitch that struck me, and post later in more detail.

The Specific way you handle the basic technologies seems flawed. The General Idea is very good, don't get me wrong... The way you have it working now IIRC is that when I get Television (req. Electronics 50%) Electronics will dip down to, say 45% or some such. This may be ok for Just handling Television. But Space Shuttle also required Electronics 50%! So researching Television would preclude Space Shuttle the way you have it now. This will Infuriate many players, and makes no sense. This type of thing will probably occur quite a lot for different techs as things get further along.

Instead of what you've done, I propose that when you Just get a tech the involved basic tech will stay at the same number. However your new shiny tech will start out without full effectiveness, and will only reach full when the associated basic skill rises by a certain amount (or fraction of the base needed). So you'd start out with small-payload, expensive space shuttles, but as electronics or other basic technologies, like aeronautics or space tech... improve your shuttles would get better And cheaper. So at electronics 60% and space tech 60% (just picking numbers for example) your space shuttles would be x% more effective.

Another related problem in civ is that when you make the First of a mil unit it performs like every other. I'd like to have a way for them to get Less expensive with the number built, and more Effective with the experience had using them. Perhaps this isn't in the tech model per se, but I"m mentioning it here since there may also be a tie-in to basic military operational/tactical techs that I think you do need eventually.

Great Job and thanks for moving the ball forward on this.

-Mark