Demo 6 Technology Model

[LDiCesare]

The figures I initially thought we should have were more like this:
(Military Tactics tech only)
It would start at 0 for the whole-history. This means its value would be 0 in Dawn/Jericho scenarios. The value would be 10 for the start of a Delenda scenario, and presumably around 15 at the end of the scenario. It could be the same for a Attila scenario.
For a scenario, the values actually do not matter much, except in that you can reuse the same military.xml file. The real problem we will have is to see how much the tech level increases over a game which spans from antiquity to modern times. Until we have a scenario which spans the whole history, it will be hard to adjust: I will put values for the various units so they are more around 0 (warrior), 5 (archer), 10 (phalanx, light cavalry), 15 (cohort), and the RPs generation rate so it goes 10-15+ in Delenda. Long term, we do not know how many fights will occur in the game so the level reaches 100 at modern times.
There is also a high risk that the size of the map has a big impact upon the number of RPs generated (in this case mostly through battles). I think until we have a scenario which spans some time (like stone age -> iron age or antiquity -> renaissance), it will be quite hard to know how much we must tune. I think it will be quite hard to "reverse engineer" a 100 level at modern times for all ancient techs.

[Richard Bruns]

Originally posted by LDiCesare
I think it will be quite hard to "reverse engineer" a 100 level at modern times for all ancient techs.

You're right. Maybe we should consider giving up that benchmark. It could be more trouble than it is worth.

[ogj20]

Sorry to butt in on this forum, and if there is a more appropriate place to post this, please say, but this discussion caught my interest and I just wanted to contribute my 2c.

I think you could at least partially solve the difficulty of 'reverse engineering' a tech level of 100 (or whatever) for ancient techs in the modern era, by slightly modifying the concept of the underlying 'all-tech' that was suggested earlier.

By calling the 'all-tech' tech 'Time Period', and making it advance strictly according to a formula, rather than by how much research gets allocated to it behind the scenes, you'll effectively set an 'expected rate of progress' for Civs.

Techs that are at levels massively behind or ahead of that expected progress benchmark would be helped and hindered respectively. Techs would naturally sit at a particular period of time, and would tend to be discovered sometime near then.

Long term techs would no longer require you to carefully ballance their rate of development across the whole time period of the game, only during the periods where they become critical for gameplay, as at other epochs you could just 'let them go', secure in the knowledge that they couldn't go to far out of whack no matter how badly balanced their development became.

This should make life easier for developers, since they'd be able to easily guage what tech levels various items should have as requirements, simply by looking up when that object was developed in the real world and converting the date (roughly) by formula, and have at least limited confidence that they will be discovered by Civs at times that make sense, to some extent no matter what course the game takes.

This approach should also reduce the effect of large maps generating more RP's from military sources, since games on large maps with many battles would just settle into an equilibrium a bit ahead of the expected time line.

This should automatically have gameplay balancing benefits as well, those people who want to research like crazy will be able to get ahead of the curve, but find it increasingly difficult to stretch their lead, stopping someone totally running away with a tech based victory, and preventing siliness like people using nukes in roman times etc.

On the other hand those people who don't like managing tech and only want to colonise or warmonger won't be penalised too heavily for their lack of interest. They will be given a bit of a helping hand if they fall to far behind technologically, since their research will naturally start to become easier.

Not to say that it would be impossible to get ahead or fall behind, just that it would become increasingly difficult the further from the model of 'real history' of development you took your Civ.

This would mean that all techs would need to be measured against a common scale, so that there was some way to tell that e.g. nuclear weapons level 4 should be devloped in roughly the same time period as food 95 and ships 40, though presumably this would be accomplished by having an offset level for all techs (i.e. 91 for nuclear weapons and 51 for ships in this case).

It would also enable you to nicely express one Civ's technology levels compared to another, i.e. "we are 200years ahead of them in shipbuilding, but we lag by a century in gunpowder and engineering".

[LDiCesare]

Hi ogj20, very interesting idea.
I think it has merit for all that you say plus for those who would like to have a more history-faithful game.
But there is one major drawback: All civs didn't have the same techs at the same time. China has had a hugelead over Europe for instance: they were centuries ahead of Europe for centuries. Then they just started lagging.
This would be difficult to show with a static timeline. I also, personnally hate it when there are specific artificial constraints which prevent me from researching fast in a game like civ. If I build the libraries, I should get the result, not spend lots of turns in the mid-game to discover horseback riding...
However, for locale-specific scenarios (e.g. medieval Europe, or a map limited to China-Corea, or maybe modern times, where for example Japan managed to cross the tech gap very efficiently), the idea has great potential.

[ogj20]

I didn't envisage tying techs down exactly to a specific time they should be developed, just making it progressively harder to get ahead of the curve.

That way it would be perfectly possible to be, say ten or twenty or thirty tech levels ahead of where you would expect a Civ to be at that point, but you'd have to put increasingly punitive amounts of research effort into it, which would reduce the gains you'd get from it, making it more likely that players (or the AI) would push hard to get that ten-twenty tech lead, then concentrate on maintaining and utilising that edge rather than pushing it even further.

It all comes down to weighting the return on investment. Having an all-tech element means it's unprofitable to try and develop individual tech areas way ahead of what makes sense given the rest of your tech. Tying that into the game date means its unprofitable to develop your whole tech base way ahead of what makes sense given the state of the world.

It should help to prevent the major problem with Civ type games, that once you pass a critical point the game just gets easier and easier, you have more tech, so you better armies, you have better armies so you capture more territory, you capture more territory so you have a bigger economy so you have more tech and more armies and .... eventually you'd have to be totally incompetant NOT to win.

One of the best things about this game is that it seems to have so many things build into the design that will help maintain the challenge at all stages of the game. Everything that helps you in one sense makes life more difficult in another, and sooner or later the costs outway the benefits.

Large armies make you powerful to a point, but eventually cripple your economy. Micromanagement gives you control and focus, but is less efficient than leaving things alone in the long run. Large empires and conquored territories boost your economy, but give you headaches in the form of revolutions, politics, religion if you try and take too much too quickly. Trade is good, but the diseases that may come along with it aren't etc.

This would be another of those things, better tech gives you all sorts of advantages, but overdo it and you'll find there are diminishing returns, rather than the exponentially increasing returns that you see in most Civ-type games.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi ogj20, thanks for "butting in", this area of discussion has been fallow for way too long. My basic position on your idea is similar to Laurent's. It seems to have too large an effect in straight-jacketing the tech progression.

I think that with proper tuning, and inclusion of social effect that aren't in there yet, that we can prevent the sillinesses of things like nukes in Roman times that you mention. Its only because of the extremely artificial way that techs are handled in games like Civ2 that such things can happen.

That said, something like your proposal could help to tame the system if it runs away worse than I currently think it will. Seeing how long this has layed fallow here, I'll have to try to give Richard a nudge and see if I can't get him to fully spec out the knowledge-based system he was talking about.

Thanks for the contribution to the dialog, and please feel free to put forth suggestions in any area of interest!

-Mark

[Fosse]

What if the idea that ogj20 brought up isn't tied to the timeline, which is scaring Mark and Laurent because of the rigidity it would impose on every game, and is instead tied to certain research based events?

Instead of saying "it will be more difficult to discover iron working before year X, and will get progressivly easier after year X" you could say "iron working will require progressivly less tech investment to master as the time advances further from the discovery of bronze working."

So a civ that discovers bronze working and then doesn't invest its economy in metallurgy for a hundred years will get a discount towards discovering iron working when they do start researching again. This would simulate the knowledge built up by a century of metal working, and the passage of time, which allows more chance for insight.

A civ that discovers bronze working and then continues to research at full throttle should naturally still discover bronze working earlier than the first civ, but will also spend more research points to get it.

So now we don't say "you should discover tech B between 1856 and 1888 AD." Instead, the message is "Tech B is going to be easier to discover fifty years after Tech A is discovered than it will be ten years after."


Forgive me if this is unintelligable or not in the right direction... but ogj20's idea sounded great to me, as somebody who hates the ludicrous clip at which research is done in the Civ games.

Keep up the good work.

[ogj20]

Having thought about it, I see that the general effect of the crosslinking of the tech tree through 'helper' techs, and research that is generated mostly by the (major) part of the economy of your Civ that is out of the players hands (or beneath their notice to avoid it sounding like a bad thing, which it isn't , rather than a brilliant approach to reducing micromanagement , which it is) will almost certainly deal with the problem all by itself, without the need to try and push research in the game towards a particular predefined rate.

As I have come to understand the model, it seems that it should deal with things like the benefits that a thousand years of additional work on say Bronze Working will have on the ease of developing Iron Working. The use of Bronze working and its applications will create Research points in their higher level techs, e.g. metalurgy, and a high level of metalurgy makes research into Iron working proceed more rapidly when the player (or even the people through the wonders of the economy model) decides to research it.

My idea of making the all-tech that tries to couple all development together locked to the time period was mainly an attempt to make it intuitive what it was there for and what kinds of effect it would have, and because I thought you might get gamebalance benefits from it.

Having had second thoughts I agree that it might actually reduce the fun of playing if the player felt they were being artificially restrained from developing technology, and that Civs with very disparate tech levels existing at the same time does make sense.

The example of China that LDiCesare used has convinced me of that. Particularly given that the tech model handles 'backsliding' if a Civ finds itself unable to support it's tech level, a phenomenon China encountered about 1400AD, when increasing internal and external conflict led it to switch to persueing an isolationist policy, emphasising the status quo, which started the lagging behind he talks about.

That just leaves the issue of what to call the allround helper tech, I'd be tempted to suggest 'Technology', which would give you a even more super macro level way for the player to handle tech if they didn't care about it, just bung money into technology, which helps research 'stuff', letting the AI/economy handle all the distribution and goal setting etc.

Of course that would confuse people who see the world through the eyes of a scientist the way I do, because they'd think "I put all this money into technology, and all I seem to get is Art, religious and military tactics development, where is the technology, like trains, mathematics and things that go blink?"

Perhaps something a bit more arts/science neutral like 'Development' would be a better name? That seems to sound right, you can envisage having things like "Your Civ's level of development is... Research becomes easier with a better level of development... The Chinese are more developed than us"

You could also use it when assessing things like technolgy advancement due to trade, to include some of the effects of prejudice and self-superiority that tend to abound when more advanced civilisations deal with less advanced ones. It could be easier for knowledge to flow from more developed civilisation to less, even if the overall less developed civ has better tech in specific areas.

For example a generally better developed Civ could tend to ignore the farming techniques of a generally less developed Civ, even though they are better than their own, since 'what could such primitives possibly have to teach us, look they plow their fields with oxen, not tractors... hahaha'. Of course they do use a highly developed crop rotation scheme, well bred strains of cereal, and carefully balanced pesticide/natural predators against pests which actually makes their farming more efficient than Mr Colonial know-it-all with a big tractor, but it'll take him a long time to notice that, because he doesn't think there's anything for him to learn.

[Richard Bruns]

Originally posted by ogj20
Having thought about it, I see that the general effect of the crosslinking of the tech tree through 'helper' techs, and research that is generated mostly by the (major) part of the economy of your Civ that is out of the players hands (or beneath their notice to avoid it sounding like a bad thing, which it isn't , rather than a brilliant approach to reducing micromanagement , which it is) will almost certainly deal with the problem all by itself, without the need to try and push research in the game towards a particular predefined rate.
.

I was going to respond to your initial post by saying this, but you beat me to it. Your analysis is perfectly accurate. By forming a web of interlinked technologies that depend on each other, the system of helper techs should ideally keep the system in balance, eliminating the need for an artificial constraint. It is still possible to race ahead, but only if you find a way to pump up every single technology.

Earlier, we had an idea for two "Tier 0" technologies that are helpers for a lot of other technologies: Math and Language. The former is a helper for all scientific and technical stuff, and the latter is a helper for all the social and art stuff. Perhaps those could fit the niche of the all-tech, or we may decide that a single Tier 0 "Technology" tech would work better.
I have to go to class now. More later.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Richard, good to see you!

This thread is above the 150-post limit and needs to be closed. Please go to the Technology Model 7 thread to continue the discussion. This one is now closed.