Technology System Version 5.1

[Richard Bruns]

Stuff2: We are no longer using percentages to describe tech growth. We are now using the term 'levels' to avoid confusion. Level 100 technology is the technology we have today. Levels are not supposed to represent some fraction of the maximum amount of knowledge you can get.

[Stuff2]

Oh. Ok. I see...

But I still think there should be limits on how far certian techs can progress. And I don't like the idea of assuming that every field of knowing had advanced to equal size in 1 januari 2000. That's what i dislike with current model. Otherwise i really like it. It's far better than any other I have read about.

[Richard Bruns]

We are not saying that all technologies have the same amount of knowledge. The year 2000 is simply a good standard to judge the technolgies by. We can figure out how many times the ability of a technology has doubled, and then use that to determine what the starting value of a tech should be. A technology that has advanced a lot has a lower starting level, and a tech that hasn't grown much will be assigned a higher starting level.

This means that a certain rise in tech level always corresponds to a certain gain in knowledge or ability. A rise of ten tech levels will always mean a doubling of knowledge or skill. Also, it is easy to judge your progress in a technology. A tech level of 70 always means that your technology is one eighth as good as modern technology.

I hope that clears things up. I'm glad you like the model; we put a lot of time and work into it.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Personally I'm for once we get the model running somewhat smoothly (ie making sure it works) that it just be that each tech starts out at .01 or 1 (depending on if we're using decimals which i'm for). From there we go ahead. The reason why is some things have doubled more than 10x since 7000-5000 BCE (and i'm not just talking about computers and electronics). I think we should scrap the 100=levels at dec 31,2000 because it forces to many restraints as apposed to the other method.

On another note if we're using decimal points i'd perfer we change 100.00 -> 10.000. It will make it much easier IMO for most people to chart how techs have progressed then as apposed to every 10 it doubles wheras every whole number it doubles.

[Lord God Jinnai]

I have considered starting everything at zero, but I don't think it would be as good. With that kind of scale, it is hard to understand what the tech levels mean. There is no clear reference or scale, so the meaning of the numbers is lost.

Another problem is that it is harder to define a starting point for the tech. Is level zero agriculture the kind the Egyptians had in 6000 BC or the kind of agriculture the Sumerians had at the same time? Once you lose the clear tech level standard, the model becomes less coherent.
-----
What do you mean the meaning is lost? The players would still know that there scores are doubling every 10 or 1 (whatever scale we use) in effiency, productivity whatever. That's easier than trying to define everything based on modern day. It also has the problem when dealing with future techs what we shall define them as.

Also we don't have to base the starting value on any of theirs. The starting value is the minimum ness for anyone. FE minimum agriculture would be that you know how to plant your own plants that you would other scavange for.

What technologies have doubleed more then ten times in history? Remember that the tech level is based on what you can do with the tech, not technical specifications.
-----
I would say transportation is one. We've gone from travel by foot and small canoe-like boats to cars, huge steel ships capable of ocean travel, air and space flight have also been achieved.

Medicine and related fields have done so. From herbal remedies shrouded in obscurity to on the verge of eliminating diseases that have plauged mankind for eons.

Mathematics could possibly be one, if not it comes close. I mean how many people back in the BCE era needed imaginary numbers? They didn't even have the number 0 (with the exception of China later on).

Now there are many fields that will fit nicely into here like agriculture, physics, chemistry, economics, etc. I just don't think we should base it on 1 time period and if we do it shouldn't be at modern day, but when we begin the game. People will understand more then because they can compare it to when they started the game and how they grow from there instead of trying to see how they compare to present day because on dec 31, 2000 probably no one will ever have everything equal to modern day.

Changing the GV to one is a possibility, but I think that the current scale is easier to deal with. I thought that we were only going to show the integer part of the 100-based scale, so there are only two or three numbers displayed, with no decimal part. A 0-10 scale would force us to display decimals if we wanted any decent output, and I find that numbers with decimals are less convenient to work with.
-----
I get kinda confused using a hundered scale and having it double for every 10 on that scale. For me its easier if we use just 0-10 and drop that last zero or make it an additional decimal point.

[Richard Bruns]

LGJ: I understand what you are saying, and you have some good points. However, I still do not think that starting at zero is best. I think that most people are most familiar with the modern era, and that the numbers would mean more if they are directly related to something familiar. Numbers based only on a loosely defined historical minimum just would not make as much sense to me, even though I know a lot about history.

I have a hard time imagining that our medicine or any other tech is well over 1024 times as good as they were in ancient civilizations. Are people more than 1024 times as healthy or over 1024 times less likely to die of a disease? I know that the amount of raw data we have has doubled more then ten times, but the application and effects of that data have not grown nearly as much. Ten doublings is a huge change, and should be more than enough to cover the scope of human history to the present.

If we double skill for every one tech level, then we have to display only one digit or a decimal number. People will want to know tech with more precision then a doubling (think of the military consequences of tech levels) and I think decimals are a lot uglier and messier than a two-digit number.

But that, like a lot of this, is a personal preference. We should probably hold a vote about these issues, or at least get a few more opinions.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi guys:

I was trying to be good, and keep my nose out of things, but since opinions were solicited!

Personally I'm half with each of you... I would prefer a scale that starts with 1 far in antiquity, and is 100 for modern times. The place I'd put the flexibility, as Richard and I discussed before (and I deferred to him), is in the 2x 'knowledge' per ten points. IMO by tweaking the 2x a bit, say from 1.5 to 2.5 depending on the particular tech, you can cover a large range of overall knowledge advancement. I think its more important to have things feel right in general than to get the exact math straight. I think the "starts at 1, 100 is present" will do the best for the average player. But we may just have to pick one approach and see what people think.

[Richard Bruns]

I have considered starting everything at zero, but I don't think it would be as good. With that kind of scale, it is hard to understand what the tech levels mean. There is no clear reference or scale, so the meaning of the numbers is lost.

Another problem is that it is harder to define a starting point for the tech. Is level zero agriculture the kind the Egyptians had in 6000 BC or the kind of agriculture the Sumerians had at the same time? Once you lose the clear tech level standard, the model becomes less coherent.

What technologies have doubleed more then ten times in history? Remember that the tech level is based on what you can do with the tech, not technical specifications.

Changing the GV to one is a possibility, but I think that the current scale is easier to deal with. I thought that we were only going to show the integer part of the 100-based scale, so there are only two or three numbers displayed, with no decimal part. A 0-10 scale would force us to display decimals if we wanted any decent output, and I find that numbers with decimals are less convenient to work with.

[Richard Bruns]

Mark: If it were practical to put everything on the scale you describe, I would agree with you. Your system would be the best thing to do if we all had lots of time and resources, but currently we do not have the ability to make this scale work.

It is possible to tweak the numbers in the system so that the tech goes from zero at start to 100 for modern tech. However, I estimate that rescaling the tech tree to do this would take at least 100 man-hours more than using a strict 2x per 10 (or 1) scale, for reasons I described earlier. Changing the growth rate causes consequences throughout the system that must all be addressed, playtested, and debugged. I don't think that this scale would be worth the time and effort.

[Mark_Everson]

Richard:

I wasn't really suggesting a complete overhaul, but rather some tweaking. One easy place to modify the 2x per 10 is in the handling of applications. They already have a structure for increasing faster or slower.

So my suggestion would be that we go from 1 to 100 with 2x per 10 as the nominal value for every tech. But where we think that isn't appropriate we can make corrections in application effectiveness to somewhat compensate. I think that this would work well enough for a game, although there will clearly be some irregularities.

I just want to avoid really turning most players off by things like having Medicine inexplicably start at 30, or -20! If computers start at 40 when everything else is at 60, as we have discussed before, I don't think is a big deal, and we can do it the way you envision.

I really dislike using decimals in the tech levels, just to put my vote in.

[Richard Bruns]

The 0-100 scale does not require a complete overhaul, but it requires a huge amount of tweaking. In addition to influencing applications, tech help each other. Also, we can't just change the scale without changing the number of RP's that players spend to advence the technology.

For a tech to go from 0 to 100 when it normally would not, we have to change all of the following numbers:

m and c for the technology
h and O for every technology that is affected by the tech
h and O for every technology that helps this tech.
The W value for the tech.
h, L, G, and F for every application that is affected by the technology.

These changes would take a long time, and would probably create a lot of bugs.

[Lord God Jinnai]

The problem with the way you wish to have technologies is fine up until someone starts developing future technologies and then it gets really out of whach, even for near-future ones there will be lots of problems.

[Mark_Everson]

OK, one more idea, and then I'll quit bugging you two on this point.

How about we do everything Exactly as you have it worked out now, but with one modification. Just for the player interface, re-scale all the model tech level numbers to the admittedly arbitrary 0-100 scale.

So if Agriculture fits naturally on the 0-100 scale it is just left as is. But if Medicine starts at the beginning of the game at +30 so as to keep the 2x scaling right, just apply a simple linear formula to rescale the 30-100 range so that the player sees to 0-100. No modifications are necessary except in the interface, and those are trivial. Trust me, virtually nobody will care that the exact 2x per 10 scaling is slightly broken for Medicine... and players will have something they can make sense out of.

LGJ:

Assuming you were responding to me, what problems are caused for future techs by the 0-100 scale???

Richard:

I'm going to do the tech for econ for demo 5 this weekend finally... has anything changed from before that I should know about that impacts that model or its helper techs?

[Richard Bruns]

Mark: I have some reservations about showing the player something different than what is actually going on, but if you think people will like this, then we can put it in as an option. Can we do a poll to see what more people think?

[Mark_Everson]

Sure, we could have a poll. As a matter of fact, because the rescaling approach is so simple, we could just do it the way you have in mind for the first shot. If it turns out as weird as I think, then the rescaling is an easy band-aid to put on it. If I am the only one that doesn't like it (and I might not even be gauging my own responses right) then we need do nothing!