Tech Tree Revision: Playability

[eleazar]

But I think you should highlight in the tech tree, which technologies give rise to buildings, ship improvements etc. and which are just prerequisites for other technologies. I think this would make the tech tree much clearer. you just need to add some icons for buildings, ship improvements etc. in the tree.

"Theories" (techs that don't do anything but lead to different techs) have a larger, different shaped "box".

If you change to "list view" there's a little summary that tells you what kind of thing the tech allows, but some techs do multiple things, so you still may have to read the description to get the full idea.

[OllyG]

I would like to see categories that are a little less about the imaginary branch of science in which an advance was discovered and more about the practical application of the tech.

Practical applications-related categories is how they are / were supposed to be set up. Growth is about growing planets, Production is about increasing production output, Ships is about making new / better ships, Learning is about increasing research output (sort of), and Construction is about infrastructure (or stuff you need to be able to do other stuff faster / better). There used to be an Economics category that was about increasing trade, though Bigjoe5 removed it some time ago, perhaps because it was useless in the current game.

I don't like the Ships category because everyone has to research it, since building ships is a major part of the game.
We should split it up a bit. As an example we could have a Robotics Category.
We currently have Robotic Production -> Military Robotic Control -> Spacial Flux Drive -> Contra gravitational maintenance -> Nano Robotic Maintenance -> Nano Robotic Hull. (With various other Applications and theories leading off this.)
Also we have Alogrithmic Elegance -> Artificial Minds -> Sentient Automation -> Basic Autofactories, with Sentient Automation needing Robotic Production -> Nano Tech Production -> Sentient Automation
So both Autofactories (Production Category) and Nano Robotic Hull (Ships Category) need Robotic Production
Also Robotic Production -> Nano Tech Production -> Nanotech Medicine -> Nanotech Cybernetics -> Cyborgs (Growth Category)

There is nanotech in the growth category and in the ships category, but it could all be one category, which seems to have a good theme and would allow some ships, some growth and some production. An empire could concentrate on Robots and be playable through the game. This is the kind of category we should have. The prerequisities from other categorgies should be relaxed a bit, so that the theories can be reseached without cross linking. The nanotech in growth and ships could be brought together, so the theories from the current categories could go;
Robotic Production -> (Military Robotic Control ->) Nano Tech Production -> Nano Robotic Maintence -> Nanotech Medicine -> Nanotech Cybernetics
This way a single path along the techtree gives a variety of different potential applications, a bit more playable while just following one thematic thread. The Spacial Flux and gravitation bits before Nano Robotic Hull can be moved into some other gravity themed category.

I hope this all makes sense, I know the presentation is pretty rubbish.

[eleazar]

There is nanotech in the growth category and in the ships category, but it could all be one category, which seems to have a good theme and would allow some ships, some growth and some production...

IMHO Category names should inform the player what it's techs will be about, so if he wants "Bananas" he'll know to look in the "Fruit" category, because everybody knows bananas are fruit. "Nanotech" as a category fails that test. Unless you already know all the techs that falls under "nanotech", that category name doesn't help you figure out if the techs you want will be in that category or not.

You might make a major branch of the tree based on the nanotech theme, that contains various tech in different categories.

I agree in general that the tech tree should be wide with many more or less independent branches so that (unlike Civ for instance) there are very different paths you might take to very high level techs.

[Bigjoe5]

IMHO Category names should inform the player what it's techs will be about

I don't really agree. That's like saying the player should know what the tech does by reading the name ("Enclave of the Void"?). I would prefer if the category names were designed to increase immersion for experienced players (MoO2's "Physics", or "Fields" for example, which are still an indication of what's in the category, but focus more on the sci-fi explanation for the techs' existence), rather than providing direction for new players. If a new player wants to know what's in a category, he can read the description of the category. Plus, it's not necessarily the best idea to limit the techs in a single category to a set of techs that can be easily summed up in a pithy category description, depending on how the tech tree ends up being structured.

[eleazar]

IMHO Category names should inform the player what it's techs will be about

I don't really agree. .... Plus, it's not necessarily the best idea to limit the techs in a single category to a set of techs that can be easily summed up in a pithy category description, depending on how the tech tree ends up being structured.

If you can't easily describe the category, what is it for?
Might as well just copy in Geoff's question to you from earlier in this thread:

What would you suggest be the point of categories then, in a tech tree of the current basic layout? If they're not useful to sort by what sort of things techs do, then how are players going to use categories, and how are players going to find techs that do a particular sort of thing?

I don't particularly care if the name is a little bit fancy, but a category IMHO should contain all the same sort of stuff. Not a disparate group of techs united only in the technobable used to explain them.

MoO2 categories didn't matter much because of MoO2's approach, you just selected something from the tech screen-- if the category names were removed it wouldn't have mattered much.

[eleazar]

Something odd happens when you delete a ship design that is under production. The ship will stay in the queue, but never be completed.

[Geoff the Medio]

Something odd happens when you delete a ship design that is under production. The ship will stay in the queue, but never be completed.

That arguably makes sense... You've got an incomplete ship, but have destroyed the plans that tell you how to finish building it.

[eleazar]

Something odd happens when you delete a ship design that is under production. The ship will stay in the queue, but never be completed.

That arguably makes sense... You've got an incomplete ship, but have destroyed the plans that tell you how to finish building it.

Logically maybe. But from a user's perspective you would want some indication if something is in your queue, and it is never going to finish. Since the item is still in the queue, and finished ships of the deleted design continue to exist in the galaxy, it's reasonable to assume, that the it might finish up.

Still obviously this is not the most urgent issue. Such ships in limbo can be deleted.

[Bigjoe5]

What would you suggest be the point of categories then, in a tech tree of the current basic layout? If they're not useful to sort by what sort of things techs do, then how are players going to use categories, and how are players going to find techs that do a particular sort of thing?

The point is that most of the same kinds of techs are in the same category. For example in MoO2, if you wanted beam weapons, you knew to research Physics - not because Physics was a "beam weapon" category, but because you knew that most of the beam weapons resided in Physics. The player can know which category to go to for a particular type of tech without having a category devoted to that type of tech. It's the same story with the mock-up multiple-choice tree I made: missiles and fuel cells are in chemistry, SR and PD weapons, energy hulls and planetary defense are in Energy, trade, espionage, computer and logistics-boosting techs are in Computers, etc.

Basically, if category isn't the same as "path through the tech tree" so we have lots of interdependencies between categories, and there are no mutually exclusive tech options in the same category, then yeah, it makes sense to have more specific categories (though in such a scenario, it's questionable how much putting a tech in a particular category will help the player figure out how to get to it), whereas in a tree closer to having a column structure, having a bunch of smaller categories that basically lead to better versions of the same tech, a la GalCiv2, is boring.

[eleazar]

I've made a list of obsolete techs. In most cases they were half of a redundant theory/application pair. So if something isn't working you can easily check if the referenced techs still exist.

http://www.freeorion.org/index.php/Obsolete_Techs