Well, considering that it's the bonus that you actually want, it actually makes no difference whether the randomness is in the appearance of the tech or the bonus.

The problem is, after one game, that tech line is no longer hidden. You know what to expect.

That would take some doing, as units will be player-designed and will vary drastically in stats and weaknesses, but it would still be possible. I like that, and think it will be in the game.

Since cost would (hopefully) be balanced, what you really mean is not random research but auto-generating tech trees. THAT would be fun.

I think that is where we have had a communication error.  Yep auto generating tech trees is a much better way to put it.

I never wanted the core techs to be hidden.  They should be visable.  The upgrade techs, and the fancy extras should be hidden.

Core techs (fixed tree placement, visable.) - bowmen, calvery, farming, etc.

Advanced techs (variable tree placement, hidden until unlocked.) - crossbowmen, heavy calvary, irrigation.

Excentric techs (random placement, hidden until unlocked.) - tech bonuses to core / advanced techs, healing herbs, etc.

 

as far as realism,  the list of selectable techs would just be ideas that your people have had, and you chose which ideas you want to invest in.

I am starting to see where a compromise can effectively come into play that will make the game better for everyone.

Make the base tree non-random, shown techs AND some random "spice techs" that are still shown (like playing a game of Civ4 in which philosopy appears only 1 in 4 games). I imiagine spice techs will be crazy stuff like derigibles, blunderbusses, etc. Good times for all.

Make it so that there are certain "Field" techs that require an investment and give random bonuses. "Civics" "Philosophy" "Research Methods" and "Art" are all decent examples. These techs would be the more theoretical stuff, ie funding an academy of the arts will likely give you something good, but god knows what it will be.

Once a line on the base tech tree ends (ie on the weapon tree youve researched all weapons and known weapon based techs) you are given an option to simply invest in it and hope for the best. The fruits will be stackable (ie +1 sword) but random in what they are, with completion time related to benefit (ie better advantage, longer research). This is an infinite tech tree, and the system can balance itself. The "randomness" will be heavily weighted against things youve already got bonuses for, so your +4 swords mean that sword research will be both longer and less likely. This creates a system in which your rewarded for your calculated investment without knowing what it is.

The simple truth is that FULLY random techs, while I would love it, would probably create too many "OMFG gaem h8s me!!1!" posts. FULLY revealed and planned tech tree is however dull, and can never be infinite, unless stardock has some kind of awesome program that creates a never ending line of techs without overloading your PC, lol. Thus the best option is a mix, and I like the one described above, though my bias should be apparent.

 

Anyway, hopefully a year long beta will create a system beyond any of our puny dreams.

I'm feeling realistic.  Multi-faceted technological breakthroughs, you research woodworking and improve the cost of your pole arms, the strength of your bows, etcetera.  You guess at what it actually did and go hunting for changes if you want to find out.

 

Randomization is annoying me more and more as I hear the crazy ideas some of you have for it...

I think it is important that the tree have some "big" techs.  That is what made civ so great. 

 

Most fun strategy comes down to gambits.  Risk low defense to try to score big time offensive firepower?  Risk being weak militarily but build a strong economic base?  To make this type of thing fun, there has to be a few good game changing techs that are expensive but worth it.

 

My favorite card game is partnership canasta.  I like it better than duplicate bridge because it is a great gambit game.

What I find disappointing about the techs presented in the july faq is that apparently every single race - or whatever word is more applicable in EWOM - can use every single mount as long as the right tech is researched. Imo it would be way more fun to have each race linked to different mounts - maybe in the form of a bonus like 'race A gets a +1 combat bonus if riding wolves'.

What I do like about the teching is that it potentially opens up different options to winning this game without the need to actually having to plow through hordes of enemies. One of the things I disliked about Civ IV was that it was such a huge hassle to mob up the AI that were left when the game was in a winning position. MoM had a better sstem for this because you could attack just the wizwards fortress and get an opponent out of the way and I hope to see something similar in EWOM.

Apart from that I see different people making different statements about how they see the tech tree working. Most of them sound fun and workabe, yet I do not favor any one in particular. Once Stardock proposes different systems that we can choose from it may be more viable to discuss what works and what does not.

Oh, and adding to my argument, the very last thing I want to se is something similar to the GalCiv2 tech tree. That one was huge, very difficult to navigate through and boring. Having to tech your way through tons of techs that essentially do the exact same thing was extremely boring in my book. If there are different techs for making weapons sharper and such, let us hope we do not have to plow through tons of techs just to get to some real advancement.

I really wish research was more like random discoveries instead of research a specific thing. How many leaders go into a lab and say ok I want you to research lasers with X components and Y disfusions and Z hyper active expulsions?

Research should just be a population value, education of that population value and costs of resources and of course random intelligence of those educated population values and then let the scientists or in this case the research wizards just have their go at whatever comes.

Many discoveries in our own world were by ACCIDENT when trying to actually research something else. Like the microwave I think was an accident and washing detergent and taffy.

I just wish there were more "surprises" in research instead of the cold hard facts in 20 turns you are going to get this upgrade. That is sooooo ummmm bland an unrealsitc really.

Master of Orion did this well I think where you put in so many research points into several catagories or just one catagory and you got potluck on what you discovered over time.

Worlds should be unique each game not the same each game. Thus there needs to be more whatifs and surprises and so what if you got screwed this game and didn't discover the sword of everslaying the first week of the game. My gawd you can play 10000 games of it afterwards. lol SO what if the AI borks you one game because it got lucky and you didn't? Must every game be a I WIN or the game suks? Must every game be Balanced in your favor or the game suks? You don't win anything when you beat these games anyway so why not opt for more challenge and harder ways to win it instead of WAH the AI got the Sword of Everslaying before me and that's no fair WAHAA!

If i recall correctly, Master's of Orion 1 had infinite technology. Once all the unique technology paths were exhausted you basically got generic Technology X Level X to research. Each research of this generic technology gave percentage bonuses such as -5% reduced cost to all technology X items etc.


Masters of Orion 2 had some interesting technology research mechanisms.
Each research category would always have 3 possible research options.
However, you could only pick 1 out of the 3 available to research. If you wanted to get the other 2 options, you would have to steal or trade technologies from other factions that may have researched those technologies.
Races with the creative trait were able to learn all 3 options.
Races with the uncreative trait were not able to select which specific technology option they wanted but were instead were randomly assigned 1 of the 3 possible options upon research complete.

Personally i found MoO2's research system to be one of the most interesting.

Well I'm all for anything but canned and knowing what you are gonna get research. Forrest Gump said it best; Reseach is like a box of chocolates you never know what you're going to get.

I don't think Forrest Gump said that. But tghen again I don't believe anything you say, so it doesn't really matter either way.

Can't you solve the scale problem by basing the bonus off the DIFFERENCE in techs?  Instead of 'sword 27 = very slightly better than sword 26', 'sword 27 = effective vs armour 27, less effective against armour 28 and very effective against armour 26'.  In this way, techs are like 'skills', and it doesn't matter how good your armour is - only how much BETTER it is than their weapons, for a floating bonus different for everyone's tech level without needing a system whereby it's nearly a waste of time doing further research.

Could concievably work..... actually, this is an excellent idea! Just so the costs matched up in some way...... in fact, with a simple linearly increasing research cost, you've got your diminishing returns right there! Excellent thought!

Oh yeah, the costs should still increase in a linear way, so that to catch up to 'swords 27' is non-trivial.  But rather than having endlessly diminishing returns of +0.0002 bonus, just use the difference as a modifier.  This also would mean that getting swords 27 when everyone has armour 20 probably isn't worth it, as the bonus/cost would be bad at this point.  Once everyone else reaches swords 24, it's more worth it.

Wouldn't this work out the same way in the end as a simple atk power or defense increase?

 

No, because your power would be an S-curve instead of an exponential curve, with the inflection point where weapon tech = armor tech.  Interesting idea!  It prevents high-tech from ever being overwhelmingly powerful, but still makes it important to stay ahead in the tech race.

However, it would also be a little difficult to carry out, requiring all kinds of tables and relationships between different techs.  Easier to screw up, I imagine, and a little risky simply because it's novel (I think).  And furthermore, it leaves open the problem of a tech 27 weapon versus an enemy (like a wild grizzly bear) that does not wear armor.

It might be that this model better describes reality compared to the standard model, since weapon and armors evolved competitively and neither really became exponentially more powerful.  Instead, a weapon might arise that is no more powerful against ordinary flesh, and no better against armor, but is better able to disable shields (like Roman javelins, whose name I forgot).

That would be the pilum.

For the infinite-tech weapon/armor stuff, you could take the HoMM route to Att/Def. Every attack over the enemy's defense is +5% damage, every defense over the enemies attack is +5% Extended HP. Basically doubling damage with +20 attack, and half damage with +20 defense. As a second example, 32 attack rating vs 30 defense rating does +10% damage. I don't see why something similar couldn't work for Armor/Weapon tech lines, though it is a little dullish for a research.

As for random tech trees - I find these perfectly fine if done right. I play Sword of the Stars quite a bit, and the most important things are baseline (subjective opinion, some of my friends disagree), everything else is a 1-100 dice roll with the odds pending race. It's extremely rare that I've felt failing a roll has had a significant outcome on the game - though I suppose it can be if you openly rely on something that has a random chance to begin with. More often than not I simply find some other way to press an advantage.

Taking the SotS example a bit further: Techs were NOT cheap, the money your enemy spends on a tech can be money you spend on combat units (often a LOT of combat units). You can then use the ships you have to cripple their infrastructure before they can even field their new ships. The Zuul in SotS were basically built on this, having both poor research efficiency and a high failure rate on acquiring techs to research in the first place. In other ways the the advantage of tech was slightly diminished by high-tech ships being significantly more expensive to build.

I wouldn't want to copy and paste the SotS tech tree style by any means, but I think it's still a good example of a random tech tree that can be learned from. Ultimately I feel a properly done random tech tree can give good players a way to show solid planning and creativity over playing spreadsheet general and making a static order of things before even starting the game, while still at least providing enough strong core techs that can't be failed as fallbacks to ensure a few bad bits of luck don't cause everything to go bad. Personally, I would far prefer that the techs available be random, and not the techs I get upon researching something.

Edit: Now with paragraphs!

Hrm... maybe that was my problem then, Foog.

 

I'm a tech-player, by nature.  I turtle up, build my techs, then striek.  That's how I play.  No wonder SOTS drove me nuts!

I wonder if an absolute differential makes sense with infinite research, vs. a relative differential.  That is, if Attack = 10 and Defense = 5, rather than say +5 we could say 2:1.  Thus, as kingdom/empire tech increases, the absolute difference matters less and less, but always provides at least some edge.  This tends to make a logarithmic curve (which I prefer) but keeps things a bit simpler to evaluate.

Thoughts?

I agree with Saber Cherry on almost all points. I would merely like to add two very minor points: (1) that diminishing returns (no matter how you want to calculate them) are important for balance reasons, and (2) no matter how realistic any gameplay element may be, unless the game is a simulation (e.g. flight simulator), all elements of any game should always help contribute to or at least not be a deterrent to FUN. (Fun is most certainly open to debate, but, I believe, in a TBS game, must at least contain the element of keeping the number of valid strategic choices as open as possible and reducing the number of no-brainers. As long as there is a single correct solution to any problem, it seems that that portion of that TBS is broken.)

 

NO! Clearly "Sharpened Pointy Sticks XVII" Is a better upgrade because you get a better bonus earlier. I know you need to research "Blunt Objects" first but trust me pointed sticks are the way to go.

 

That said I prefer infinite slightly unpredictable research. I'd like to give a command of "better infantry wielded ranged weapons" and get surprised with either a better bow (longbow) or a whole new path such as the crossbow. Then later be able to give a more specific upgrade order such as Improved Crossbows. The idea being without the "pure research" being ordered you rarely get anything new but by ordering pure research you can get a revloutionary technology. At the same time I'd like to see a mix of pure research and specific research.

 

By the way Saber the fix for a monster that doesn't ware armor is simple. You give world spawned monsters a diffrent class of armor. That class of armor would be designed to scale based on the level of the creature and the weapon being shot at it thus allows said monsters to remain a threat.

OverRNGing always leaves a baaaaaaaddddd taste in my mouth.... my general rule of thumb is that the chance of something random taking place should be less than 10%.

Haven't played much of the MOO series, and it's been years since I have and don't remember the randomized tech mechanic, but I'm with many of you in thinking it adds an additional layer of variety to a mechanic which could become stale.  Someone mentioned Civ 4.  In that and many other games one not only ends up memorizing the tech tree eventually, but their strategy tends to follow the same pattern from game to game.  At least mine did.  Randomization helps by keeping the player in that "explore" stage of the game where they're not certain how a strategy will work and you still have to noodle through your decisions based on what’s available.  More like a card game.

That makes absolutely no sense.  What do you mean, the chance of something random happening should be 10%?  Can you give an example?

By the way...  did you know that virtually everything that happens in real life is random at the lowest levels?  At the macroscopic level, things are predictable only because they are the average of myriad chaotic microscopic events that have a bias.