Technology System Version 5.2

[Richard Bruns]

The objects are easy to define, but they cannot do anything without the methods. I could finalize my plan for the methods if the following object list is agreed upon:

Tech Tag objects, with the Tagged RP's as parameters and the methods for calculating the tagged RP's.

One Tech RP object for every technology, with the methods for calculating itself based on parameters in the Tech Tag object.

The Technology object, with the level as a parameter and methods for calculating the level.

(Would it be better to have the RP as a parameter in the tech object? I'm not sure about this one.)

The Application Objects, with methods for calculating the level based on parameters in the tech object.

[Richard Bruns]

I think we should discuss technologies relating to the breeding and improvement of domesticated animals and plants. These techs are similar enough to be covered by the standard tech model, but there are a few differences that require a couple special rules. Here is my view of the situation:

I think these techs should be defined as follows:
The quality of the animal, and the civ's knowledge about how to train and use the animal.

First, the tech for a certain animal cannot exist if the civilization has no access to that animal. Native American civs could not develop the Domestic Horse technology.

The first domestic horses were not strong enough to hold a rider on their back. They were only able to pull chariots and carry lighter loads. After people developed better breeds, they were able to hold humans and light cavalry was developed. Contrary to what Civ 2 says, chariots were developed earlier and they are much less effective in warfare than mounted riders. When horsemen appeared, chariots became obsolete. But the horse still wasn't strong enough to carry a heavily armored rider. They had to develop better breeds before cataphracts or knights could be used.

Training is also an important issue. Horses have to be trained well before they will go into combat, and training them to deal with explosions in modern combat is even more difficult.

So in Clash terms, we have the following progression of the Domestic Horse level 3 technology. This chart does not show all advances and the applications have other prerequisites not shown, but it shows the general idea.

Prerequisite: Wild Horses available
Level 10: Pack animal only
Level 25(better training): Chariots available
Level 40(better breeds): Light Cavalry available
Level 55(better breeds): Heavy Cavalry available
Level 70(better training): Riders can use gunpowder weapons.

There are also a few other effects. The level of the technology helps determine the effectiveness, speed, and range of mounted soldiers. The level also does a little to determine the effectiveness of farming and transportation before the internal combustion engine.

There is also a more complicated application. If your cavalry is not trained to deal with gunpowder and you face an eneny with explosive weapons, the effectiveness of your cavalry troops will be greatly reduced. This helps explain why early guns were so effective even though their range and striking power were worse than the bows of the time.

In general, there should be a check for the reaction of your animals in a battle. Inputs are the technology your enemy is using and the tech level of the animal you are using. Depending on the results of the check, some percentage of your animals may bolt. This takes those troops out of the battle and causes confusion on your side. Military model people (if we have any), how would this be implemented in the battle system?

The spreading and trading of this tech is another unique aspect. While most techs can be copied and transferred as data, this one cannot. You have to physically deliver the better breeds of horses. Also, it is a lot harder for this tech level to decrease. In fact, it may never do down normally. The genes will stay steady or improve by themselves, as only the healthy and fit horses will breed.

Conversely, the tech will drop more easily in some situations. Ownership of a group of horses is a zero-sum game, so if someone steals or kills all of your best horses the tech will go down. This won't happen if someone steals a normal knowledge based tech. Also, assunming that the best horses are chosen for war as they usually were, extensive battlefield deaths could reduce the tech level.

So we will probably have to define a derived class of Tech objects called Breeding Techs. They will have most of the characteristics of teh base Technology class, but the methods will have to be changed to account for their differences.

Does this sound good?

[roquijad]

Use, taming and creation of new horse races is IMO such an important factor in warfare history that if a special tech system for that is needed, then we must go for it.

I like all the things you say with the exception of mixing within the same concept the actual technique of breeding/training/taming with the availability of horses themselves. What if we treat horses as a "special" in terms of the economy model?

Specials like copper or oil exist in some mapsquares and people can take advantage of them for economic production. They can also be traded. If we now make some specials, like horses, transportable, that is, a mapsquare can change to "having the 'horse' special" from not having it, then the avilability of horses is IMO modeled better.

Civs, through trade or military appropiation, could obtain horses, which in gameplay terms means changing one of the mapsquares they control to "have horses". The tech on the other side has to do with the technique itself. Together, you can produce military units with the abilities you described.

The number of military units you can produce in a turn is given by the amount of with-horses mapsquares you control, while the characteristics and types of units available depend on the tech.

The tech could also be useful to produce more with-horses mapsquares. The greater the tech level, the greater the chance for reproducing animals and get a new with-horses mapsquare.

[Richard Bruns]

Rodrigo: This tech does not include the presence of wild or tame horses. Rather, the provinces in your civ must have enough wild horses (as defined in the Ecology model) before you can get the tech. Once you have the tech, horses are assumed to be integrated into the economy so IMO it would not be good to keep modeling them as a natural resource at that point.

You saw the posts out of order, so I understand the confusion. I should have mentioned that this was a continuation of the post in the Ecology thread. We should discuss the map availability of horses in the ecology model, and this thread should be dedicated to the advancement of the tech once you have the horses.

[Richard Bruns]

I see now how I caused some confusion. When I said that taking horses would lower the tech level, I didn't mean that the level included the quantity of animals. I meant that if the horses lost were of the best breeds, there could be a small drop in the quality of the gene pool. If you had horses of similar quality elsewhere, there would be no drop in the tech level.

[roquijad]

Yes, I got all confused.

Here's my new proposal considering also your idea to handle horses as infrastructure. I'll put all the implications for the three models here, just for simplicity.


In the tech model:
I'd suggest the tech itself shouldn't count in any horse-specific info such as genes or horse race. The tech should be only the taming/training/breeding technique. And therefore, the only special thing about this tech would be that animals are needed to develop the tech, while in other senses it's a normal tech.

In the ecology model:
For other animals such as oxes, mules, etc the ecology model indicates if they exist in the province or not and how many of them there're. For horses it's the same, but we can split them, only because of their importance in history, in, say, 3 races. Wild/Ancient/Natural horses, FirstBreed horses, SecondBreed/Nowadays horses (or simply horse1, horse2, horse3). Of course, in the ecology generator only Wild horses appear in the beginning of the game.


In the economic model:
It sure sounds really odd to consider animals as infrastructure, but it makes a lot of sense. However, a couple of differences between "real" infrastructure and "animal" infrastructure make me prefer to simply manage animals as a new feature in the econ model.

People and the govt can invest in real infrastructure, increasing it, while this would be kind of strange for animals. Real infrastructure can't be moved/stolen/traded, while animals can. Real infrastructure doesn't "grow" by itself, while animals do (they multiply).

So why don't we just add animals as a new "thing" in terms of what a province has in the economy model? Having their own properties (such as tradable) ensure a better modeling. I believe for the econ model is really simple to include them as a factor to production. I propose the econ model to have a "animal force" variable. Just one variable related to animals as input to production. Using the info from the ecology model about what animals are present, we compute this "animal force" like, FE:
Number_of_horses3*1
+Number_of_horses2*0.7
+Number_of_horses3*0.4
+Number_of_oxes*0.6
+Number_of_mules*0.7
+...

The econ model then treats animal force as a normal infrastructure variable for production.


How the three models interact?
The ecology generator creates "wild horses" as a special. Once a mapsquare with horses is within an economic/political province, the special disappears from the map and a number of Horse1 appears in the province stock.
The same is done with other animals. The province then has a list of animals in stock like:
Number_of_horses1
Number_of_horses2
Number_of_horses3
Number_of_mules
Number_of_oxes
etc

The ecology model also manages, each turn, their multiplication, increasing number of animals in stock via a base value and a modifier given by the tech system (the breeding/taming tech). Then the econ model uses the number of animals to compute "animal force" as an input to production.

Animals this way can be traded, stolen, killed and moved without problems. It just changes the stock. Everytime a military unit is created that uses horses, the number in stock is reduced and the military unit gets part of its properties based on the horse race and breeding/training/taming tech level.

The higher the tech level is, the higher the probability for a new race of horses to appear, unless the horse3 already exist in the province.

In this way IMO everything has sense. For simplicity instead of having a large list of animals, we can aggregate the least important ones and have only:
Horse1
Horse2
Horse3
Camels
Other1: mules, oxes, etc
Other2: cats, dogs, etc


What about animals for consumption (like pigs)?
In the ecology generator I'd give each mapsquare a "wild life" value according to climate, etc. All mapsquares conforming an economic province would be summed to create a "wild life food value" that would act as a multiplier for food production in the econ model. This multiplier can in time be also affected by the Breeding Tech, so the better the tech level, the greater the multiplier.

What do you think, Richard?

[Lord God Jinnai]

Well i don't think we need to model many animals. Like everything else, just those important to history (outside religion...cuz there we can have anything modeled). Horses are definatly one. Dogs are too, though mainly in the beginning. Dogs are also the first animal to be domesticated (or rather wolves were).

Here's the list of what I think is essential to model:
Camels
Dogs (Formerly wolves)
Horses
Elephants
Cars (maybe...Other than reducing mice/rat population and religious importance i don't see any use).
Livestock in general

Remember everything we add makes things more complicated so think carefully what is really needed.

[Xuenay]

quote: Cars (maybe...Other than reducing mice/rat population and religious importance i don't see any use).

Thats a typo, right? You mean cats?

------------------
"Now Lone Star, you will see that Evil will always triumph, because Good is Dumb!"
-- Dark Helmet

[Richard Bruns]

roquijad:

The problem with taking horse quality out of the tech equation is that it becomes hard to do tech prerequisites that way. You need a certain breed of horse for heavy cavalry, and if that isn't in the tech it becomes difficult to define the time that your civ can make those knights.

It is possible that we could ignore prerequisites and use the horses as required inputs in the production function. So when you order a province to make knights, it checks to see if it has enough horses of the right quality. Those horses are taken out, and the quantity and average quality of the province's horses decreases (they took the best horses).

While that would work, it seems like it would generate more micromanagement than the tech level approach.

This multi-topic thing is getting out of hand. Posts are getting missed or read out of order. We haven't really begun to discuss the military aspects of this, and I think the population model might get dragged into the discussion as well. So, I'll copy everything we have to date into a new thread devoted to this topic. That way we can have a semi-coherent discussion of the issue. When we have finished, then we can post our conclusions to the proper model threads.

[Lord God Jinnai]

The quote was copied from another forum so i put it in a more relavant thread:

F_Smith:

quote: Lordy: Again, this is data model speak -- the 'Ethnic Groups' will absolutely have to hold info on what their individual tech levels are. Like an individual 'car' holds info on what kind of tech it was built with (to an experienced eye). That has nothing to do with how the player manages tech info, or how the game 'models' technology . . . they're two different things. It's a 'data storage' thing only.

Well the data storage then implies to someone looking at it that techs are related to the enthic groups which isn't right. Techs are related to ethnic groups by changing the ease or lack thereof of advancing techs is really a one way process (in almost all circumstances...there are a few exceptions such as developement of agriculture). Techs in a given area don't care what ethic group you are. The only modifiers to what is the 'functional tech level' (as apposed to the 'Maximum Tech Level') is the wealth of the people and their social status. Those who of the LC and slave class are always considered to have less. The MC and UC can vary as to what is used.

Ethnic groups shouldn't have the tech level under it...it should be stored at the mapsquare level.

[Beör]

quote: Originally posted by Lord God Jinnai on 09-14-2000 04:57 PM Ethnic groups shouldn't have the tech level under it...it should be stored at the mapsquare level.

To be frank I thought that tech level was stored at civ level - but maybe I've got it all wrong.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Well it was originally planned to be that way (or atleast via the province), but for better to store 'functional tech level' at the mapsquare level for more realism....though i don't know about the 'maximum tech level'

[F_Smith]

Um, ya'll don't understand:

It's from a coding organization standpoint *only*.

It has to do with object design. Objects must contain (encapsulate) all info about themselves, so that other parts of the program can use that data.

How your game models handle the data is an entirely seperate deal -- (altho if ya'll were using OO design, it could improve the models, without a doubt . . .).

Ya'll are designing a game. We need to make a game program. That means 'OO' models. So any models ya'll make will have to be translated to an OO design by the programmers, anyway, in order to code it.

Just keep that in mind.

[roquijad]

I think techs cannot be stored under EGs. You'd then have to model inter-EG tech spreading, because techs an EG develops can be easily copied by another EG living in the same province/mapsquare.

Storing tech info at the mapsquare level seems like a lot. That'd imply heavy use of compatuational resources. I'd keep it at the civ level or at most at the province level.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Well we can try at the mapsquare level...an see how it works although i think it won't work as tech info has more objects in it than any other model and as time progresses the amount of calculations which will almost definatly need to be done every turn will increase exponentially because more basic techs are added and more application techs are added and their levels are calulated as well as the probably the application tech above/below it for social conditions that could slow changing over to newer tech and the fallback on older, but reliable technology from loss of education of the civ as a whole. So new application techs won't go away unless the tech level drops too low although they can be replaced. This also doesn't include the nightmarish rp calculations that would be done for rp generation because although the OO design might allow for quick and easier gathering ot the relavant data, it can't do sh*t for increasing the speed the CPU calculates its math problems which become increasingly complex and numerous as time goes on. These will haveto be redone every turn as simple small changes can have vast effects on RP production and basic tech costs.