Quote:Original post by Wavinator
What did you have in mind in terms of diplomacy options?

Nothing elaborate, really. It was just coming from a generalized point that finding allies could even the odds for the declining empire/kingdom facing a rising or stable one. It was a sidenote.

Quote:Original post by Wavinator

Quote:Original post by Way Walker
I'm out of the game loop (the only 4X's I've really played are CivII and Alplha Centauri) so maybe this isn't such a new idea, but I've never heard of a game where there was some cost to maintaining your tech tree.

Natural tech loss could tie into something I've been trying to beef up-- the civil / noncombat side of empire building: Funding knowledge institutions, fostering a culture that values learning, stabelizing the society and its economy.

Maybe this could really be a system of tradeoffs. If your people are highly interested in art and entertainment, VR tech improves and people are happier, but science and business suffer.

I wonder though: Are you maintaining your position on the tree as a whole, or each branch (or even groups of nodes)?

To keep it simple, I was only considering the tree as a whole, but I think it'd be better to split it at least a little. I hadn't given it too much thought, so this'll be something like thinking aloud.

In Civ II, technologies were labelled as military, social, economic, academic, or applied. So, one way would be to have different trees with hard dependencies among them. For example, I think explosives was military and chemistry was academic in Civ II, but you needed chemistry to get explosives. One trouble here is that a tree might be blocked until you get advances in other trees and the player will just be shovelling resources into a dead end.

You could also soften the dependencies. Maybe you can get explosives without learning chemistry, but it'll cost more. It should probably be cheaper to research just explosives than chemistry and explosives so that specialization has some benefit. This could lead to the interesting situation where your military research spending is enough to maintain knowledge in explosives but not enough to learn it (e.g. if you learned it by first learning chemistry but then lost chemistry).

Another option would be to gain an advance when some linear combination of military(M), social(S), economic(E), academic(AC), and applied(AP) research reached some level. So you might gain chemistry when
2(M) + 1(S) + 2(E) + 4(AC) + 3(AP) = 100
and explosives when
4(M) + 1(S) + 2(E) + 2(AC) + 3(AP) = 100
Note that the RHS can be the same for all technologies by scaling the coefficients on the LHS.

Anyway, that's the sort of picture that I get when you say investing in different industries.


I also have a picture of something inspired by FFX's sphere grid which I think could make oneofthose's research supercomputer idea more intuitive (though my explanations may make it sound plenty confusing). I think it also goes along with your comments on not losing all the knowledge just because you've lost all your tech centers.

Advances are laid out on a 2D plane. At the start (in a game like Civ II that starts out very early) you have one research center (the palace in Civ II). You can associate each research center with a point on the 2D plane. At the very begining, you'll be limited to points labelled military, social, economic, academic, and applied. A circle will grow from the point you choose as time passes up to a maximum radius/area determined by the resources dedicated to the research centers associated with that point (or possibly the research centers are the resources dedicated to that point).

You can rededicate a research center to a new point within its associated circle (perhaps restricted to advances, or just certain advances, within that circle). The original circle will decay losing advances but a new circle will grow gaining new ones. If a research center is captured or otherwise lost, the circle about its associated point will start to decay. If you capture a research center, you'll gain some portion of that circle, the portion decreasing with the distance to your nearest research center on the tech plane.

I think you could also incorporate different sorts of tech centers. I'm thinking something basic like Civ II's libraries, universities, and labs. Perhaps libraries are a small investment, corresponding to a small circle on the tech plane, and can only be associated with low level advances on the tech plane. Universities provide more resources and can be associated with higher advances, and labs provide even more and can be associated with even higher advances. This could encourage players to remember mathematics even though they're off researching the latest and greatest, and give a low cost way to acheive the basics in economics mid-late game for a militaristic player.

Or, you could go further with the different sorts of tech centers. Maybe libraries and universities are good for academic advances, theaters and museums are good for social advances, barracks are good for military advances, etc.

Or, maybe there are different tech planes for each area and they interact in some way, which is bordering on suggesting it's in 3D (or higher dimensional?) space.

Have technology advances represented by objects (data disks, libraries, etc). These can be traded, stolen, copied and destroyed.

So, if you discover a "Laser Weapon" technology, then this is stored as an object. You can only build Laser Weapons so long as you have access to this Laser Weapon Tech object.

Yo could safe guard this object by making a copy, but with more copies comes the risk that your opponent could infiltrate and steal it (or copy it from your objects), so having a few, easily monitored copies would be sensible.

However, as they can be destroyed, it is possible for your opponents to target your storage facilities and destroy your techs. As these advances can only be used while you have the tech objects, you would then loose all those tech advances and enter into a Dark age until you could build up.

Now, as some techs become obsolete (that is nothing you currently use requires them), they might get forgotten, or even destroyed to make space for the needed tech objects. When this happens, the loss of the latest techs becomes more of a problem and you can be sent way back.

A carefully targeted assault by a weaker force can then have a greater effect than it could in a game where once a tech is discovered, then it remains discovered. It creates a game where asymmetric warfare becomes possible and where infiltration (and counter infiltration) can be a strong mechanic.

And besides. Being able to "blow your opponent back into the stone age" just sounds like so much fun. :D

Quote:From a strategic standpoint a player could decide to place more emphasis on their military in a desperate attempt to stay alive. During these times economic technology could be forgotten.

I prefer for knowledge loss to occur through emergent gameplay rather than from some hidden formula. Firstly it makes it easer for the player to understand what is going on

Oh I let my libraries decay and the knowledge stored in them went as well.

as compared to:

Hmm, I'll reduce my spending on research. Hey where did my tech tree go?.

It also allows the player to manipulate it better. Instead of having a prefixed action that causes the decay of knowledge (reduce the spending on its maintenance), they might work out some way of shuffling things around that allows them to keep certain parts and let unneeded parts decay (they can have their cake and eat it too).

Emergent gameplay is much more strategically interesting than a prefixed formula.

Instead of loss of knowledge, could it be shifts in available resources that bring different tech flavors in and out of vogue, with "dark ages" in the awkward time between your graviton-providing binary black hole system collapsing and your neutrino-based infrastructure getting up and running?

The relics from the past age would be either dismantled to build new stuff or used sparingly. I envision this being like Mad Max, where you've got all these cars, but suddenly there's no gas, so you run what you've got, and as the supply dwindles, you start stripping down the Buicks and hitching camels to them.

So your Deuterium-besed fleets, which are all leveled to 8th tier, become prohibitively expensive to fly, and you're researching antimatter reactors to level 3, and in the meantime you've got a bunch of level 2 units and factories and a few irreplaceable level 8 units and defunct level 8 industrial sites that you're stripping down to build level 2 industrial sites of a different color.

It's an awkward few generations, and it has the "dark age feel", but you aren't totally crippled by a deus ex machina, and probably had some warning that your ion well was drying up, so you're faced with the dilemma: Do I sprint to the finish and have the greatest possible stockpile of high-tech artifacts with which to rule the dark times, or do I start redirecting resources before the crisis occurs, softening the blow to my economy and infrastructure and ensuring a shorter period of disarray?

That would be a useful and nuanced gameplay feature, and wouldn't feel like a kick in the balls to the player.