Technology System Version 5.2

[Richard Bruns]

Previous Technology Thread

I had to make this thread because the old one had over 150 posts. I will start further discussion when the tech builder is finished and I have entered the techs I have into it.
[This message has been edited by Richard Bruns (edited May 06, 2000).]

[Richard Bruns]

Stuff2 said that we should make sure that civs with a large population do not automatically have an advantage in research. This is a valid point, and we should consider it when we decide exactly how RP's are generated.

I assumed that RP generation would be based primarily on the economies and activities of the civ. The social model should also have a big impact on tech growth. I never intended for RP production to be determined the number of people you have. The important things are what you are doing and how your society feels about innovation.

So a small country with a good economy and society could easily compete with a large country that is mismanaged.

I do think that it is reasonable to have a diminishing returns scheme for economic activity. For example, the fifth airplane factory would not generate as many RP's as the first one.

Of course, a large country will have more economic and technical muscle than a smaller one, all other things being equal. Compare the USA and Great Britian in World War 2. The sheer size of the American economy allowed the country to research the atomic bomb and better war equipment while simultaneously producing massive amounts of weaponry and supplies. It is simply unfair and illogical to assign arbitrary penalties to larger countries.

However, there should be penalties for having a large civ, especially if the size came from military conquest. My hope is that the social model will reflect this, making it harder to govern the domestic affairs of a large empire. The technical benefits of size should be cancelled out by the social consequences. I think that this would be much better than assigning arbitrary penalties to the technology growth.

[Lord God Jinnai]

I agree that size of population or of land mass shouldn't matter (the latter shouldn't matter unless the civ doesn't have enough of a certain type).

Large countries can generally devote more resources to R&D than smaller countries, however, this is not always the case. Like Rich said a smaller country that has a society more favoarable can in fact do more, espically if they have more economic potential or if the government supports that type of R&D or not.

As far as diminishing returns for economy that sounds resonable for most things, however there should be a minimum set.

Also another important thing that determines R&D is the current level of technology of your civ. Some technologies do help a lot in increasing rp production such as "Factory Production", so if your a small civ and gain that earlier and develope its use, you can go much further much faster.

[shimmin]

There seems to be concern that a small civ should be able to keep up in research with a large, sprawled out one. Certainly, this is historically possible (eg Britain or the Netherlands in the 1600-1700's).

Historically, one of the reasons many large empires did not progress significantly faster than smaller ones is duplicated effort. In metalworking, for instance, the large empire did not gather every smith in the empire to one place to develop better techniques. Rather, there were metalworkers throughout the empire, working alone or in small groups who all worked independently to advance their craft and who guarded their secrets jealously.

As another example, a huge horde of peasants growing their crops sprawled across most of a continent would have little interaction, so there is little point to adding the results of their experience together when calculating RP's. A smaller group of farmers that shared techniques would be able to advance ag at least as fast, if not faster.

I propose a simple rule:
Only the RP's from the province that produces the most RP's count for the purpose of advancing tech.

Or a less severe variant:
Best province: 100%
Next best: 50%
Third: 33% and so forth

Since the size of a province depends on technology and infrastructure (it more or less represents an area that can feasibly be administered together), it can be taken for an area of the empire where there is reasonable internal commerce and ideas get spread around. The faster ideas travel, the larger a province can be, and the more the citizens of a sprawling empire can pool their efforts.

[Richard Bruns]

Maybe this quote will help explain how I think about RP generation. I wrote it some time ago, but most of it is still valid.

-----

Let’s consider a sample ancient civ to give context to this RP production. Suppose that the small Snurb Empire has ten simple agricultural provinces. RP’s are generated by each of those provinces, and also by trade within my empire and contact with the neighboring tribes. In addition to this, my capitol has a library, university, theatre, and forum. I am working on building some roads and fortifications as well as maintaining an army to defend myself.

Note that these numbers are just meant to be examples. Exact values will have to be determined by playtesting.

It is reasonable that my provinces would generate a base average of 400 RP each and split most of it among the techs relating to basic activities of that province. Any techs relating to farming, daily living, and simple crafts are thus supported, as well as social techs and arts. The advanced capitol city makes 1000 extra RP’s that give extra support all the basic sciences and arts. My trading activity generates 700 RP’s and supports transportation, economics, and some production techs. The basic operation of my government and centralized religion makes 500 RP’s for techs related to government and management, literacy, social technologies, and arts. The building of the roads and forts generates another 500 for engineering, masonry, and construction techs. And the maintenance of my army gives me 300 RP for military techs. So I have 7000 RP’s. . .

As I continue to develop my civ, the RP production will naturally grow. Those roads and forts will make travel and trading easier and safer, so there will be more RP generation in that area. As the provinces become more developed, they will generate more RP’s. My government will have to get bigger and do more, so I get more RP’s from that. And as I expand my territory, I come in contact with new people and use my military and diplomacy more. My tech should grow at a healthy rate.

Note that most of the RP’s are used for specific things. The player would only have control over a small portion of the province RP generation and a larger proportion of the RP’s generated by the advanced cities. Everything else counts as RP’s that come from building or doing something, so they are assigned automatically.

-----

The only major change I would make is the implementation of a diminishing returns plan for all of the agricultural provinces. However, I would recommend that these diminishing returns be based on communication and transportation technologies, rather than a fixed scale. So the Snurb Empire would have pretty severe diminishing returns before the roads were improved, and the roads would lessen the effect.

I'll assign new numbers to the provinces to better show how I think the diminishing returns should work. To keep the numbers the same so RP generation is proportional, I will multiply all province RP generation by five before applying diminishing returns. This may seem like a lot, but at this point the peasants would be supporting almost half the technologies.

For reasons I will explain later, I am assuming that the most productive provinces are the ones closest to the capital.

Old system RP generation:
500, 450, 425, 410, 400, 400, 390, 375, 350, and 300.
Total: 4000

New system "True" RP generation:
2500, 2250, 2125, 2050, 2000, 2000, 1950, 1875, 1750, 1500.
Total: 20,000

New system returns before roads:
2500, 750, 200, 75, 25, 8, 3, 0, 0, and 0.
Total: 3561

New system returns after roads:
2500, 1250, 625, 300, 150, 75, 40, 20, 10, and 5.
Total: 4975

Note that under this system, the provinces of a large empire with bad roads would produce less RP's than the provinces of a small empire with good roads. Thus good management is rewarded and ruthless expansionism is not.

I have a preliminary idea for calculating these diminishing returns:

1) The base RP generation for each province is calculated. RP gain from bordering a neighboring civ is added to the province in this step.

2) This number is modified by a factor that measures the ability of ideas to go from that province to the capital. This represents the ability of people to put their work into the general pool of knowledge. This will have the effect of increasing RP production of provinces close to the capital.

3) The provinces are listed in descending order of RP production.

4) Final RP production is based on the following equation:

RPf = RPi * C ^(L-1)

where L is the position in the list and C is a communication factor based on the ability to share information among provinces. In the Snurb Empire, the road building changed C from about 1/3 to about 1/2.

I think C should be averaged over the entire civ. If it was calculated by province, the player could concentrate on building up only the best provinces and leave the rest in the stone age.
[This message has been edited by Richard Bruns (edited May 17, 2000).]

[Mark_Everson]

Welcome back shimmin and Henrique

Richard:

Personally I think roads are only one of many things that are important in determining final RP generation. And IMO if we did a system like yours people would just put roads all over the place (without all the other developments necessary for a truly vital civilization) and finesse the system that way. I also think that we have to work very hard so that the models do not reward people for fine-tuning province size. IMO the way you handle diminishing returns based on order of provinces in a list has a very real chance of doing that. At least it looks to me like if I can reduce the number of my provinces by making them bigger, then I would get a significantly better result with your formula. But the point I would like to make is much broader than my specific nitpicking... to my mind the most important factors for RP generation are the ones discussed below. You may have had many these already implicitly included in the provincial numbers you cited...

All:

There are a bunch of what I think are good thoughts on resource point generation in a very old thread called Research system draft
It was written by Hrafnkell, and souses the European notation where a ', ' is used in the place of where I would use a '.' and vice versa. Richard and LGJ already know about most of this stuff. This is just here for the information of some of the other participants in the conversation.

The basic premise of the research point generation part of that old system, that I will quote below, is that there are many factors which are much more important than raw size or population. Among the most important of these are technology diffusion, basic type of the economy (traditional vs. market), who holds the power in the society, and the general level of freedoms. These of course supplement the very good comments about information technologies and other things above. One idea that I heartily endorse that isn't included below is RPs generated by merchants bringing in new ideas from far afield. But I've gotten on that soapbox quite frequently, so I don't think I need to comment on that further here.

quote: III. How RPs are calculated We´ve been toying with few formulas in how excactly Research Points (RPs) are calcualted. The number of RPs a player accummulates depends on two things: how populous his state is and what social, cultural, economical and/or educational restraints his subjects are under, which determines how willing the subject is in making changes, how well equipped he is to do so from a financial and knowledge standpoint, and how easily he can get his ideas across and be socially accepted. The latter thing is much more important, so a state of 1 million people where individual freedom is high can easily outpace an autocratic state of 100 million people manyfold. Here is a list of the things that affect the RPs accumulated. We´ll use it as the basis for the exact formula for calculating this. - Population (maybe 1 RP per 100.000, this is randomized each turn (multiplied by a random number between 0,8 and 1,2) to give the number a little flux) - Economic standing of the pop. This is calculated at class basis, probably with the PCI as the basic measurement, but including such things as (un)employment, slavery, taxation, etc. [Multiply by 0,1 to 2,0] - Education of the pop. This is based on the education status of the state. [This will probably be represented by somekind of an Education Level (a floating point number (1.1, 1.2, etc), in which case we´d multiply the RP pool by the sqrt of the EL] - Cultural interest in research. This is also calcualted on class basis. Highly traditional societies, with rigid caste system and so on usually frown upon any changes. [Multiply (for each class, then add together) by 0,5 to 1,5] - Governmental view on research. The government (i.e. those classes which rule) can have very negative effects on research if it´s very centralized and powerful (only modern democratic governments are comfortable about research and the new ideas it generates, in the old days governments always feared (with right) that new ideas could usurp their power). [Multiply (again for each class) by 0,2 to 1,5] - Turn-based events. These can be of a varied nation and at the moment it´s difficult to say how big an impact they´ll have. These events will normally add (sometimes reduce) a set lump of RPs from the total pool the player has, instead of modifying the RP calculation as the other listings. [The number of RPs added/reduced should at most be ca. the total cost of an avarage advance, in most cases a lot less]

Shimmin:

While I think your general points have some validity, I really want to avoid artificial things with big effects like your proposed weighting of RPs by province size. I think that would give people large incentive to try and game the system in bizarre ways, and would end up hurting more than it helps. I also think that all the other stuff we have talked about in this thread can get us to the correct end result without having to go that far.

Henrique:

Yes, that real life can really sneak up and get you! I agree with most of your points too... I hope we can work the main effects of the rest of the game on RP generation down to something like a handful though, or things are going to be really ugly in the coding! And yes, if you can come up with both time and coding experience, that would be great, since people to program up all our cool ideas is the thing that holds us up most.

[This message has been edited by Mark_Everson (edited May 17, 2000).]

[Henrique Duarte]

oops, just a sec, trying to come out of my grave...

done it...

Just wanted to comment on empire size vs research points:

1)I believe that size does matter in how much research you can handle (more resources, more "inventive spirits" etc)

but

2)more than size the: trade, diplomatic ties and even just simple migratory / military contacts are terribly important in the inovation capacity of a civ.
In my opinion RP should be based on the following:
A) population

B) research facilities

c) comunication facilities (roads, rails, seaports etc)

d) number of cultures with which the civ as contact with, each culture would give a certain benefit according the their technological development state.

Note on cultural contact: if the multicultural civilizations are still being considered for the game then the variety of cultures in the same civ should also be considered (multi-cultural civ is more dynamic than a mono-cultural one!)

Note on what I called the "technological development state" of a culture. Should be calculated throuhg a mixture of technological development achieved and population size, this last one because once a cultural group gets too smal then, no matter how developed they are their impact is necessarly smaller. For this one I would propose a log expression (ver small pop decrease the "tech state" value a lot, but from a certain "critical" value onwards the effect becomes stable.

This cultural contact factor could be positively afected by: amount of trade, diplomatic ties, distance (in terms of time-distance, 2 weeks away can be thousands of killometers by sea,a few hundred by road or even less in mountainous terrain!)

Note on distance: - should be distance from capital to capital because several smaller and obviously closer countries should benefit from that closeness.

Lastly simple military contact should produce terrible effects, there should be a strong possibility that when two armies with different techs meet they should "trade knowldge (on this case applications only!) through fighting! things should be much funnier - on this one I think I posted something - the prototype idea I think, If you folks are interested I´ll try and dig it up.


Note for Mark
Sorry for the very long silence, Real Live has gone from bad to worse, still
I keep on checking the forums regularly and I´ll pop up as soon as things get better, and with a bit of luck/work with some coding skills on my bag :-)

[Richard Bruns]

Mark: I never said that roads were the most important thing in RP generation. In the example I gave, they were one thing that helped an ancient civilization. They obviously can't build printing presses or teleplones, so roads are the only thing they have to increase their ability to communicate. Note that in the #1-4 list I wrote, I didn't mention roads at all. The key is communication.

A good transportation system is the only way an ancient civ can improve communication. The roads example was meant to cover only a specific case. As the iron age ancient civ goes from no good roads to a decent transportation system, ideas can move around and tech growth is increased. After this initial building, more roads would not help the civ much.

The first part of the post describes my general view of RP generation, and I generally agree with Hrafnkell and Henrique on these points. With the exception of a few minor points, I think their systems for RP generation are good. The only problem I see is that they don't give RP's for doing things. I think that practical experience is at least as important as basic research, and that tagged RP's should be given for things that are being produced or implemented.

The second part of the post was an analysis of a single factor that limits tech growth. It an attempt to single out one thing and put numbers on it, so we can see how this could be programmed. It was not meant to reflect my general views of RP production. I'm sorry for the confusion; I should have emphasized the first part more.


I didn't know that players could arbitrarily resize provinces; I assumed that they were determined by the computer only. The ability of players to change these provinces will make problems for any diminishing returns system.

Is there anything that would prevent players from turning their entire civ into a single province? What do provinces represent, anyway? I assumed that they were the equivalent of a tribal unit, a city-state, or some other coherent unit that was not defined by the player.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Richard:

Well, I don't want to beat the discussion of roads to death, since I feel we both consider them somewhat important in RP generation. I just didn't like your particular approach to utilizing them... I'm sorry I mischaracterized your position as one where roads were the most important, which clearly isn't so.

I guess the way I am looking at it is that if we use trade as a measure of the movement of ideas as well as goods, then we automatically include roads, water transport, and other communications/transportation factors. At least from what I've read in terms of modern scholarship, roads don't always help that much anyway. I have seen it cited in numerous places that the Roman roads didn't do that empire much good in terms of trade, because they were largely used for moving troops and government correspondence.

I agree with you completely that Doing things is every bit as important, and frequently much more important, than the other factors that have been discussed. From our previous discussions I didn't think I needed to bring that one up because we all seemed reasonably well in agreement on it. I guess the only caveat I'd raise on this point is that doing things when you are at subsistence level, or in a very traditional economy, doesn't seem to do very much for innovation.

On province size...
At least my take on how it should be done is there in the Econ HTML document on the web page. A little more than one-third of the way down. Provinces can't be arbitrarily resized, but there is some scope for action in that area by the player. Like I say in the HTML document, I don't want to give people any reason to micromanage the province size. I picture resizing your provinces as something that might be done three or four times over the entire game.

There is further, more detailed information at the top of the demo 5 Econ thread. Some of it is of course just a first try for demo 5, but I think it gets the general idea of what I'm trying to do with provinces across.

I guess give it a read, and then let me know what you think.

[This message has been edited by Mark_Everson (edited May 18, 2000).]

[Richard Bruns]

I just realised that I never got around to posting this on the tech thread. I tried once, but the computer crashed and I didn't get back to it after that.

This is what I originally posted on the econ thread:

---
To help the AI and serve as a way to navigate the tech tree, we had planned for each tech to be assigned one or more interface tags. Each tag would be the name of the civ activity that the tech helps, and a number representing how much that tech helps. For example, a tech might be tagged with Agriculture:7 and Mining:2, meaning that it helps agricultural production a lot and mining production a little. The AI and the players can sort technologies by their tags, investing research in what is needed most. For example, a player would click on the Agriculture button in the tech interface, and all techs with an agriculture tag would be listed in descending order of the tag number.

Rather than simply being a description, the interface tags can also have a direct impact on production using this new econ model. The ideal tech value T for some economic field can simply be a weighted average of the knowledge levels of all techs with that tag.
---

The basic system hasn't changed much I posted it in the 5.1 thread, but some of the minor points have changed as the various models have evolved. To make sure we all know and agree on the system, I'll detail it here.

Tags are the description of the tech's purpose and a number telling how important the tech is for that purpose. This number, known as the Z value, goes from one to ten, with one meaning minimally useful and ten meaning vital. If a tech is useless for something, it simply isn't tagged for that thing. Tags are used for the following purposes:

They are the AI's primary method of dealing with tech growth. Other civs, you governers, and the people in a free society will use tags to decide what to research. Once the AI determines what areas needs to be researched, the tags are an easy way of telling it what specific techs to research. For example, if the computer is having chronic problems with rebellious provinces it invests in Happiness and Control technologies.

Tags determine the fate of RP's generated by particular activities. These RP's are called Tagged RP's and are automatically spent on the techs relating to the activity that generated them.

They provide the user interface for the technologies. The first layer of the interface is the tag, and the second layer is the name of the technology. It makes sense that to access a tech, players click on the tech's function. Note that one tech can be found in many places using this system. Alternately, a player that didn't want to get too involved with technology could just give RP's to the first layer if interface, and the RP's would be split among all the techs with that tag.

In all of the previous three uses, the amount of RP's given to the technologies would be weighted by the tag number. A preliminary idea for distribution or RP’s would be to give each tech a percentage of the total RP spent as follows:

For every tech, raise 2 to the power of Z/2 and then subtract one. Call this the Y value.

Add up all of these values to find the X value.

Each tech gets a percentage of the total RP’s spent equal to Y / X.

When splitting RP's among tagged techs, some preference should be given to techs that are lagging behind. Not only will these techs be easier to gain and keep up, but they are also the techs that are probably holding things back.

So there should be a temporary adjustment of the Z term for techs that are behind. It should be multiplied by some factor for every five tech levels that the tech is behind the average tech level of your techs with that tag.


Tags are the main way that technology influences the other models. The economy model already has a way to make tagged techs impact the production outputs of a province. Other models can also use the weighted average of tech levels with the proper tag to influence things. I still think there is a need for an Alter Variable command to allow techs to fine-tune some specific part of another model, but the tags will be used for the changes in the big picture.

Currently we have the following tags:

Agriculture
Education
Cash Flow
Social/Political Control
Exploration/Movement
Happiness
Health
Infrastructure
Military
Production
Prospecting and Extraction (mining)
Pure Science
Standard of Living

Questions? Comments? Tags I forgot? Let me know what you think.

[Lord God Jinnai]

quote: Originally posted by Richard Bruns on 05-28-2000 07:36 PM Agriculture Education Cash Flow Social/Political Control Exploration/Movement Happiness Health Infrastructure Military Production Prospecting and Extraction (mining) Pure Science Standard of Living

Prospecting and Extraction shouldn't be limited to mining...FE oil drilling could well fall into that category.

You did forget some or atleast seemed as though you were:

Disaster Prevention/Warning
Enviromental (?)
Communication (this includes things like ships, cars, etc. and also mail service, telegraph, etc.)
Religious/Philosophical (?)

Also I think Social/Political should be split apart.

[Richard Bruns]

Prospecting/Extraction wasn't meant to be limited to mining. That was just one part of it.

We don't want too many tags, so they should be combined wherever possible.

Revised List:

Agriculture
Disaster Prevention and Ecology
Education
Cash Flow and Economics
Exploration/Movement (includes mobile communication)
Government and Politics
Happiness and Social Control
Health
Infrastructure (includes fixed communication systems)
Military
Production
Prospecting and Extraction
Pure Science
Religion and Philosophy
Standard of Living

[Mark_Everson]

The basic idea of the model looks really good! It's probably as good as we can get a before we start into the specifics of playtesting, and find all the problems we didn't foresee

On the tags, I guess my nominations would be to split off Exploration/Movement into land and sea varieties. Land transportation and sea transportation are just so different that I don't think we can lump them together. Also, I foresee that the single Military tag will need to be split out into several subdivisions. IMO Military is just way too broad. However, we should probably wait until the military system itself is settled down before we try to get really specific with that.

[Richard Bruns]

I think we should make an effort to keep the number of tags as low as possible. I think Movement should be kept in one piece and I don't want to split Military into more than two pieces. Tags should be as general as possible IMO.

[Lord God Jinnai]

The only problem with movement/exploration comes later on when we develope space technology and future technologies beyond that that don't really increase movement, but will increase exploration. I'm not saying we should change it, just remember that.

Also communication being under infrastructure is IMO too great to be considered part of it. Communication would include like i said earlier, cars and boats for land communication, mail service and telegraph would be for service-type communication. There are other things though also, Language and writing system is also communication, so is mathmatics. So is the internet, roads, etc. Basically I guess its not that I'm saying communication needs to be serperate, but just like military, we need to seperate it to get away from the other extreme of "too broad."

Another possibility is that over time tags split up as we have more and more technolgoies and the understanding around us grows, the over-broadening comes into play a lot, but in the early game its better not to be to specific. Basically, most things should be split into 2-3 sub categoties as time goes on, though a few like Agriculture, can be fine as 1 tag.

BTW how would nomadic tribes increase there ability in technological levels, esp for food. I know it would be harder, but, well except for agriculture, it shouldn't be impossible, also some things should be easier, though the balance clearly for agricultural type civ.
[This message has been edited by Lord God Jinnai (edited May 31, 2000).]