FreeOrion

I guess they don’t add up.. at one point they did, then I changed them. I’ll fix it so they do.

Look at it this way: Your empire produces 80 RP. If you use 80 RP then research costs 1 credit/RP. You can allocate 90 RP if you want to, but now all your research costs 1.5 credits/RP. The numbers are, of course, just for illustration.. I’m not sure what the actual curve should be. If you allocate only 75 of your research points and then your research costs might be only 0.95 credits/RP. If you need income to build a fleet in a hurry you could cut several of your projects and go down to 20 RP used per turn. Now those 20 RP might only cost you 0.6 credits per RP (12 credits). This gives you 68 extra credits per turn for a 60 point drop in research.

I think KISS means simple for the player and simple UI, not necessarily simple equations for the computer. The player doesn’t really need to know the curve, all they need to know is that if they lower their spending to 20 RP their research spending will drop to 12 credits per turn.

The specifics of the curve isn’t really the important part. The important part is that the system allows you to ignore those few unallocated points because not only are they not costing you money, but they are also making all of your other research spending slightly cheaper.

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Time flies like the wind, fruit flies like bananas.

Just a heads up --

I'm heading out of the country on vacation on Thursday of next week, so if I can get a consensus on this (meaning, if enough people are cool with tzlaine #2/noelte #1) then I'll close the review before I go -- otherwise, I'll do it when I get back on the 21st.

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Surprise and Terror! I am greeted by the smooth and hostile face of our old enemy, the Hootmans! No... the Huge-glands, no, I remember, the Hunams!

@Ablaze

I think i now understand your idea. In fact you handle RP's like money and you define the amount of generated RPs as an optimum, means 1RP equals 1 AU (money). If someone needs more RPs as were generated he/she has to pay >1AU per 1RP. (just a detail, why all RP's get a penalty, it should only apply to RP's >80 so 100 RPs cost 80AU + cost(20))

Just a note: If unused RPs are converted to money i can stockpile this money and convert it later into RP's (with penalty). This way you replace stockpiling RPs by stockpiling money (with penalty).

Hmm, i have to think about it, but if tzlaine/mine idea isn't approved, i think i like your idea most.

Ronald.

Sorry about not making myself clear the first time.

I think all RP should suffer a penalty because in my experience the benefit from altering your spending does not increase linearly. What I mean is, if someone is researching 10% faster then the average person and they manage to increase their research by another 5% that is a huge leap. Someone who is researching 10% slower then average can add 5% and it will be significant, but not nearly as significant as the first person’s 5%. I think this is related to the way in which research tends to make everything easier, even more research.

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Time flies like the wind, fruit flies like bananas.

Ok, I vote for the 'partial fund project idea' of Noeltes.

I've already voted for the Noelte "one project only partial funding" idea, but can I register an anti-vote for Ablaze's "dangerous signs of colour coded sliders and allocation decisions you need a graphical calculator to make (i.e. a subtle wiff of MOO3ishness)".

More seriously, my gut feeling is that if we went with that system we'd find ourselves constantly tweaking the curves and end up only encouraging min-maxing by the players. Whilst I agree that one of the benefits of a computer strategy game is that you can have conceptually simple but computationally difficult ides, I think we shoul start from the point of view that if it's computationally difficult, it's unlikely to be simple to play, unless it's pretty clear it would be.

Alrighty. after 100+ posts on the topic, this public review is FINISHED. I'm going to update the design doc (which will now be the v0.3 doc) with the summary and then post it here, hopefully before I leave on Thursday.

kudos to everyone who took part in this very difficult discussion.

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Surprise and Terror! I am greeted by the smooth and hostile face of our old enemy, the Hootmans! No... the Huge-glands, no, I remember, the Hunams!

The following was added to the Design document based on this review:

Research and Technology

The research tree will be comprised of an arbitrary number of categories (to be decided at the time of content development, and subject to easy change by mods). The design will assume a number of categories between 8-12 for the purposes of UI. The categories will be ‘specific’ in that, give a particular tech, its category affiliation should be easily derived; it is better to have more than one potential category for a tech than to have no idea where it belongs. Example: Destroyer-level capital ship engines might belong to a ‘small capital ship’ category or simply a ‘capital ship’ category, but not a ‘construction’ or ‘physics’ category.

Each category contains two types of entries: theory and application. Applications are grouped under a parent theory. Each technology has a fixed RP cost and a fixed cost in time; both the cost and time can be modified by other techs or racial attributes, but otherwise they are largely fixed; one cannot, for example, throw money at a research project to hurry it along.

Techs may have cross-category pre-requisites. All applications must belong to a parent theory, and no application can ever be researched without its parent theory; however, a specific application may require either a theory or an application that is either above the current theory in its own category, or any application or theory in another category.

Multiple projects may run concurrently. A currently-running project may be suspended with no penalty and resumed at any later point. If the per-turn RP requirements of an Empire exceed its RP production, projects will be halted in descending order of how recently they were started; ‘excess’ RP generated in this manner (e.g. RP that would have gone into fulfilling a project’s requirements, had there been enough of it, but that is now unspent as the project lacks the required number) go into a temporary stockpile. Once enough temporarily-stockpiled RP has been generated to fulfill the per-turn requirements of an under-funded project, one turn advanced on that project, and the stockpile empties.

Excess RP produced beyond the per-turn requirements of currently active projects is wasted.

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Surprise and Terror! I am greeted by the smooth and hostile face of our old enemy, the Hootmans! No... the Huge-glands, no, I remember, the Hunams!