Demo 6 Technology Model

[Mark_Everson]

The techs that affect the economy are simple: Production and Farming.

The Production and Farming techs allow more investment in the various production categories, as well as increasing efficiency a little. The amount of money spent on these production categories determines the research put into the tech. Farming should also increase the Biology tech a little.

Just to remind you , the tech level A (T=ideal) for a given sector in the econ model does this already. A approaches T as there is more investment in the sector. T will be determined by Production or Farming level.

I am not yet set up for XML ini files in economy, but I don't think I need applications right now anyway since T will come straight from Farming and Production.

Does anyone see the need to accept growth equations other than linear ({add..) and exponential ({factor..)?

Sounds good for now. If we need something else, we can add it in later IMO.

[Richard Bruns]

New Diagnostic Tool

I have created another spreadsheet. I have learned a lot more about Excel in the past couple years, so this one is more sophisticated than my earlier efforts. This one uses a self-referencing helper tech and a changing RP input based on GDP growth to model the behavior of the whole technology system over time. I have simplified the equations somewhat, combining the effects and their multipliers into a single value.

I have found the system to be fairly robust, even in extreme situations such as zero Upkeep cost. One thing can easily break the system, however. If the TotalHelperEffect is too large, the tech level can quickly shoot up exponentially as I predicted earlier. But there is a bulletproof solution to this problem: the GlobalHelperTech value. To make the system behave, all the designer has to do is make sure that this value is approximately three times the average sum of the HelperTechEffect values for each tech.

Edit: I deleted the screenshot. For some reason it got hideously distorted and I can't post a new one because it is wider than 600 pixels. What was also odd was that it only displayed a link instead of putting the picture in my browser. But it said it was downloaded three times, which would seem to indicate that other people saw it automatically. Very odd.

[Richard Bruns]

The screnshot erased the zip file; apparently you can't have both in one post.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Richard:

I checked it out, although I can't say I thought much about the math! (I am woozy from the flu, so I'm trying not to have any deep thoughts at the moment, since they don't go anywhere.) Looking foward to having rudimentary tech in there soon!

[Mark_Everson]

What do you think is best for a simple tech GUI? I suggest:

Tells the player about tech level for each tech,
possibly rate of progress,
where the RPs come from,
and lets the player put money into tech to affect rates of change, and
Estd turns to the next few application breakthroughs (Legion etc.)

The last one is to inject a little fun factor in it.

Got any other high-level ideas or suggestions for implementations of these and/or layout?

I suspect the AI could just run on autopilot (no tech spending) for now. We may not want ancient rulers to have much luck putting money into tech, but I suggest for now we should do it (perhaps overdo it) so the player has something active they can do with the tech model.

[Gary Thomas]

The technology interface is now included in the current code.

Cheers

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Richard:

I have been making the first halting steps toward making the tech-econ hookups. I got to the point of adding some RPs and seeing if the level updated correctly when I realized there are no Activites like "Food" in the xml tech file. At least from my recollection of the model I should be adding RPs to an Activity. Can you either add the Activities, or straighten me out ;-) ? Thanks! -Mark

[Richard Bruns]

Activities

I have been unable to input and save activities using the tech editor, so I do not know how to format them in the xml document. For now, we can apply the RP's directly to the technologies. Since there are only half a dozen or so we don't really need Activities for the test.

Now would be a good time to agree on an xml format for the Activities. I don't know how they are currently coded into the editor now, though. Should we start from that format or decide on a new one? I don't think I explained them very well when the editor was being coded, so the current code may not be very useful.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Richard:

I already tried putting RPs straight into techs, but the code expects an activity and so I get an error when I try it. Gary is out of touch right now, so I guess I'll just have to work on something else for a bit. Next time I get a chance to look at the code, I'll see if I can figure out the HTML format for activities and let you know.

[Mark_Everson]

Sorry its taken me so long to get back, I've had a busy week. I think I can add activities by hand. But I also came up with what I think is a template. I thought to search for '/activity' in the code. I append the spec as a text file.

I suggest you add one like this to your xml file, and then verify that it can be read in ok in Gary's tech editor.

Gary, can you verify whether this xml should be read in ok?

[Mark_Everson]

I've thrown in a "Food" Activity using the template in the post above. the good news is that the parser didn't choke on it. The bad news is that the Technology.distribute() method still doesn't find any activities... I'm sure I can track down the error soon.

Richard, can you go ahead and use the template to put in the right activities with the right weights into the tech xml file, so that when I get it figured out we'll be ready to roll?

[Gary Thomas]

Mark:
1. D5.1 (which means roads)
or
2. Fix up the tech editor.

Pick one.

Cheers

[Richard Bruns]

I pick 5.1

The tech editor can wait until we have a bulletproof format for the xml files. I may even be able to make a web-based ASP editor and save you the trouble, or at least serve as a template. I learned a lot of programming this semester.

[Mark_Everson]

Richard:

The xml format I gave seems to work ok. I've tested it. So you can go ahead and add appropriate Activities whenever you find the time. I may of course be a few weeks before we get back to it, because of our decision to put roads first.

Gary:

I guess I have to go with Roads for now. As Richard says, we will wait on tech until you can get back to it. Its just frustrating because it looks 99.8% ready for prime time. I've gotten to the point where RPs can be allocated, but the levels don't change when I call Technology.update(). Either I'm doing something dumb, or you overlooked something small that should not take too long to find. We can pick this up again when D5.1 is out the door.

Cya,

Mark

[Richard Bruns]

The xml file is attached, but I don't fully understand it. What do "multiplier" and "effect" do? Is this a relic of the old system? As described in the first post, right now the only values in the CivilizationActivity objects are the percentages of RP's that go to each technology. This change was made at the request of either Mark or Gary.

Anyway, I left the {multiplier} tag the way it was and put the percentage in the {effect} tag. So
{recipient}
{name}Biology{/name}
{effect}20{/effect}
{/recipient}
means that the Biology tech gets 20% of the values allocated to the Activity, in this case Food.