Demo 6 Technology Model

[LDiCesare]

So should we have a Military activity that the player invests spare RP in as well as a Combat activity that only uses RP from battle experience? That makes sense; I'll add it in.

Yes, I intended to have both.
The 8 battles were quite big, as Carthage used a huge force to smack the Romans. Romans usually had little armies.
Now I know I need 40 points, I will adjust all figures accordingly, thanks for the math.
The 93 points thing was actually the bare number for one tick, which is ridiculously high, the total for one battle in a turn being the 570... I divided that by 100 to 5.7 and then to 28.5 in later tests. I'll go on tweaking this until I get the results I want. I bet it will be divided by 1000 with an upkeep of 0. Higher upkeep would mean I need more points. Having big values was useful however, as it makes debugging more visual.

[LDiCesare]

If you would post a list of the applications you have, I will make sure that the technologies will support them.

You can look at the D6 military.xml file, otherwise if you manage to download the zip I put here, the newest one is in it.
Basically, military elements are applications, and inherit tech influence. Thus Warrior defines once and for all what effects military tactics has. Horses and metallurgy I also put in based on your file. Notable elements which may need tech on their own include triremes, elephants, archers and soon transport boats.

[Richard Bruns]

Originally posted by LDiCesare

You can look at the D6 military.xml file, otherwise if you manage to download the zip I put here, the newest one is in it.
Basically, military elements are applications, and inherit tech influence. Thus Warrior defines once and for all what effects military tactics has. Horses and metallurgy I also put in based on your file. Notable elements which may need tech on their own include triremes, elephants, archers and soon transport boats.

I still can't download that zip file. I'll look for that file in the stff Mark sent me. From what you said before, I'm pretty sure the military end of teh tech tree is shaping up nicely. What needs work is all the other stuff.

[Mark_Everson]

Overall tech level issue

In getting the tech-econ hookups going, I have identified something that really bothers me. I don't think there is a solution for the issue in the tech model as currently described, but I may be wrong...

I don't like how techs can increase without limit even if most other technologies for the civ remain at stone-age level. For example, in the simple tech test technology tree we are using now, provided that both Farming and Biology increase together there is no limit to how high they can get. I realize that part of this deficiency is simply due to the trimmed-down nature of the current tech tree. In the future either Farming will have significantly more Helper technologies, or the effectiveness in farming will come from a larger number of skills such as Farm Tools, Irrigation, Fertilization, etc. If the web of required techs to increase farming effectiveness is sufficiently dense, then the problem that I'm looking at may just go away. But still I think there will be other areas of technology where there are only a few helper technologies that will generate effects similar to what I see for the Farming/Biology pair now. These will especially happen in areas of the game where we don't think we need to model technology in a really detailed fashion, because they are non-core game areas.

I also believe that no matter how detailed our tech tree is, there will be tech links that are not worthwhile putting in explicitly that still would repress the growth in a given technology if it were far ahead of the basic technological level of a given society. I think it will increase the stability of the model, and reduce the tweaking that will need to be done, if we can explicitly handle these effects in a crude fashion in the model. What I am especially keen to avoid are the ridiculous things that can happen in Civ2 where some bronze-age culture can steal or trade for Rocketry and start flinging missiles around, launched by catapults no doubt .

I don't know what we should do about this for the next demo, but I think a long-term solution is needed. Provided that others think this is an issue too, I think I have a reasonable solution. The idea is to have a helper tech that represents the gross technological level of the society. I'll call this helper All-tech for the moment. I'll get to how it's level is determined in a later post if we get that far with the idea. In the current context of farming/biology the Farming tech could have a helper of All-tech with a weight maybe half as large as Biology has now. If farming were at the same general level as most of the other technologies All-tech would neither helper nor hinder farming progress. But as the Farming/Biology pair gets to 20 or so tech levels above the rest of the technologies the progress in farming would slow noticeably, and at some point reaches essentially a steady state rather than growing without bound. This would simulate the effect of all the technologies that make more-modern farming work that are not explicitly included as helper links in the tech tree. This approach will allow farming, under the right circumstances, to get moderately far ahead of other technologies with effort. This feature is important to preserve so that the player's tech decisions really matter. But farming, or any other technology, would not be able to achieve modern levels of efficiency within the context of a bronze age culture's technology.

I think all of the specifics of this idea can be easily worked out satisfactorily. For that reason I will stop here and see what the general reaction of Richard and the rest of the team is. In addition to an all-encompassing All-tech synthetic technology, we could also have others that are somewhat more specified, like "all-military-tech", or all-social-tech... this proposal doesn't address the overall stability of the tech model to the extent that if all techs increase rapidly, it doesn't restrain the system. But I think will significantly reduce the effort needed to put into tuning the tech tree so that relatively small clusters of technologies can't shoot off independent of all the others. Of course we can design any particular group of technologies to be able to raise ahead if desired by simply leaving out the All-tech helper.

[LDiCesare]

An overall helper tech might be good, but you'd better find it a name (culture, traditions, learning are a few suggestions).
I don't know if it is needed, however it sounds reaonable. Let's hear what Richard has to say.

[Richard Bruns]

Such a helper tech could be a good idea. We'll have to test it. It shouldn't be too hard to implement. All we have to do is:
1) Assign this as a helper for every technology.
2) Add it as a recipient to every activity.

I can do this manually, via the editor, but it would be better if it is done automatically for all techs in the future.

But before we implement it, let's do some complete game playtests without it. I think that, as Mark mentioned, a more interconnected tech tree could help deal with techs that get too far off.

However, I have a feeling that, if implemented, this global helper would do more to aid lagging techs than it would to slow down advanced techs. This is probably a good thing, but it may not be exactly what you intended.

[Gary Thomas]

Now that the technology model is actually doing something, I think that the time has come to consider in somewhat more detail how it actually works.

At present the technologies have, as well as a level, a characteristic of active/inactive. Not only does this currently do nothing, but I cannot see it ever doing anything. The player has no direct access to technology. The only way it can be changed by the player is through putting research points into an activity. Hence it is the activity that should have the active/inactive status, not the technology.

(Sorry, Mark, I really thought I had posted it to the technology thread - must be all those late nights coding D7)

Cheers

[Richard Bruns]

Originally posted by Gary Thomas
At present the technologies have, as well as a level, a characteristic of active/inactive.

When a technology is first discovered, then k=1 and the technology level is equal to the start level. But k can fall below one, and the level fall below the starting level, and the technology will not automatically disappear.

A technology is inactive until its prerequisites are met, and then it is active for the rest of the game.

Hence it is the activity that should have the active/inactive status, not the technology.

Not necessarily. Consider the activity "Transportation" and suppose the player always invests in it, so it is always active. In modern times the "Flight" technology will be active and be supported by the activity. But in medieval times, there will be no "Flight" technology; it will be inactive even though the player is investing in an activity related to it.

There has to be a way to prevent RP's from going to a technology that doesn't exist yet. I'm assuming that the "Inactive" tag does that.

[Gary Thomas]

Can't quite follow this. How is a technology "discovered"? Is, for example, Flight discovered when the Transportation technology reaches a certain level?

Cheers

[Richard Bruns]

Transportation would be an activity, not a technology, but yes, technologies are discovered when prerequisite technologies reach a certain level. For Flight the required technologies would be Engines and Physics.

We won't have any new technologies being discovered in these early tech trees, however.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi All:

There's also an instance of artificial tech discovery in the Dawn1 scenario, at least as I conceive it. (Richard, you will see this shortly in the D7 testbed. Discovering horses is for now indicated by exploring a square with a horse icon on it.) When you discover horses, the Horses tech should change from inactive to active. At least I think of discovering horses as a combination of finding horses, and domesticating the first ones.

In this simple example IMO the Horses tech should start inactive, meaning that even if you have Domestication RPs there is no effect on the Horses tech, since you don't have horses. When the horse resource is discovered, only then should the Horses tech become active, and the player be able to increase Horses by investing in the Domestication activity.

[Mark_Everson]

Tech levels for delenda for D7.1

I am putting this up so we can get input if anyone's interested.

IIRC Laurent had mentioned that Legionary (cohorts) come in at Military Tactics level 20. IMO that is too high. At least the rule of thumb I'm promoting is that the ancient whole-history techs should generally have levels in the range 5-10 for classical antiquity. This is using my general scale idea (1-100 for all of history) since I have no idea what an objective value of the improvement of military tactics throughout the ages might be.

From that perspective, my take on it is that things that get up to 20 (IMO an early-modern-period type of tech level corresponding to say the 1500s) should be scaled back.

Richard if you want to come up with scales for all the techs in delenda and what levels they should have, it would be great. So far there's only info from you about the farming level IIRC. Lacking that input I guess we're on our own to figure out something.

Laurent: For the specific case of fight-generated RPs, If Military Tactics levels get to 10 and beyond too fast, I would suggest cutting back the RPs you get for a fight.

Opinions?

[LDiCesare]

Actually, in my first implementation, the required tech level was 15, starting from 10, and I had tuned the figures so that the RP output would be correct. There are more fights now than then, due to econ orders being issued, so I can scale down. I can change the start levels of the military-realted techs to 5 in Delenda, make 10 needed for cohorts and adjust the RP production accordingly. Would those figures do?

[Mark_Everson]

Sounds good to me, Laurent We'll see if Richard has anything to say...

I will look over the farm stuff as soon as I can, and try to keep farming tech in the same general range (5-10) while not generating unreasonably large amounts of food for an economy in classical antiquity.

[Richard Bruns]

Re: Tech levels for delenda for D7.1

I have downloaded the demo 7 file and will start experimenting with it soon.

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
Laurent had mentioned that Legionary (cohorts) come in at Military Tactics level 20. IMO that is too high.

If the Tactics starts at 10, then it is in fact too low, since in that case the knowledge is only twice that required to build a basic mob of men with sticks. Cohorts are fairly advanced, almost an order of magnitude better than primitive warbands.

There seems to be a lot of confusion generated by the existence of levels. This is entirely my fault, due to bad modeling several years ago. I now try to think in terms of knowledge, the linear scale of advancement. The entire concept of a tech level is IMO causing far more problems than it's worth.

After experimenting with the program, I'll come up with a scale based on knowledge. Note that I will not try to keep things within ten tech levels, for I do not think this is proper. If advancement is limited to ten tech levels, it means that knowledge cannot do more than double between ancient times and the Romans. I think it axiomatic that the Romans had technology, in some areas at least, that was far more than twice as good as the very first civilizations. Expect tech levels of up to 40.

Historical Note: I read in a military history book that the armies of Alexander the Great would have been able to defeat any army of any race at any time until the pike and shot era of the 1600's. So their tech level might be well into the fifties, at least in terms of organization and tactics.