FreeOrion

The Silent One is correct about Applications vs. Theories. As for Symbiotic Cohabitation, it doesn't quite do nothing - it removes the penalty of the Hostile Fauna special. It could (should?) also have some other functions currently, such as increasing max population on all planets, but it doesn't. In the future, there will also be more game material to work with, such as diplomacy, espionage and citizen allegience/morale, which will probably be affected, at least in part, by new applications in currently existing categories and by some currently existing applications themselves.

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nope, it doesn't

You're right - It doesn't.

I've fixed it in my version. If you want to fix it in yours, just go to planet_specials.txt and change the activation condition of the Hostile Fauna special to

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

but maybe that way:
thus not "eliminating" but rather "compensating" negative effect. i mean - just by researching tech you don't eliminate the hostile fauna itself. and that way it seems more visual to me, showing -10 for hostile fauna and +10 for tech. thoughts?

That's probably reasonable. It does make more sense to the player if he can see the effects cancelling out, particularly if he's looking at an opponent's planet wondering why Hostile Fauna isn't doing anything.

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

This is a lot harder to maintain than having one effect that's sometimes cancelled. It's also potentially harder to understand why a tech would be giving a bonus only on planets that have a seemingly negative special attched.

here's another thought: IMO tech effects are better be described in techs, not in planet-specials.

and there's one problem, look:


that's a screenshots of two consecutive turns. see? "Current" must be 28.3 but instead it become 23.0 and i assure you - on the next turn it will be 24.0 in spite of "Change +5.93" showing.

also:i think that special that produces no effect maybe confusingdon't see why it may be harder to understand. Symbiotic Cohabitation will be researched with one agenda - to receive such bonus. to me it all seems completely clear.

and by the way: your description of "Gravitonics" and "Theory of Everything" conflicted with modern physics thus became anti-scientific.

why the Planetary Ring sets MaxFarming to -5? Planetary Ring can increase MaxFarming by providing additional energy from sun, converted to electricity with solar panels. but how Planetary Ring can decrease MaxFarming? i see no logic here.

and how about that:both are theories

The tech description can easily be written to say "removes penalty from X special". This is still easy to maintain, since it doesn't matter what that penalty is exactly, so if it's changed, the tech description doesn't need to be.


Please don't mix in bug reports into a content discussion thread such as this. I've fixed this issue in SVN, though.


It's description can easily be written to say "unless tech Y is researched, which stops this penalty".


If you're looking at the meter contributions immediately after thinking about a particular tech that affects that meter, it's probably not very complicated, but if you're reviewing meters at some other time, it wouldn't immediately be apparent that one +2 and one -2 are linked, and it could appear that a tech is giving +2 only on certain planets.

Also, if there are a lot of different effects acting on a particular meter, reducing clutter by removing an effect from the listing rather than adding an extra balancing effect to cancel it out could make the list easier to read.

I didn't write those descriptions.

I haven't finished the Construction, Production or Economics trees yet.

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

I've redone the Economics tree. A couple of theories don't have apps, but like the Learning tree, it can be filled out when there's more game material. A few of the string names for the techs are have a seemingly arbitrary change made to their first letter. This doesn't affect any in-game text, and it has to do with making the tree the right shape, because techs automatically get placed in alphabetical order, to a certain extent.

The basic idea I had before was that the player should have to choose between Planned Economics and Market Economics, which is good. However, the development of this idea was limited, and there was no clear distinction between the gameplay strategies that each one would support. Now, Market Economics supports a diplomatic strategy of befriending your opponents and gaining their trust while you infiltrate all of their planets with spies and prepare to completely obliterate them from within. Planned Economics supports a more military approach of disrupting your opponents internal security and defenses as a preparation for armed invasion.

Currently, the mutual exclusiveness of these two paths is enabled by just putting Not OwnerHasTech "ECO_MARKET_ECON" in the activation condition for all Planned Economics techs and buildings.

The Economics tree is very similar in shape to the Learning tree. The middle path will most likely be taken only by those who are focusing on espionage. The final theory in the middle path is necessary for the ultimate theory in both Planned Economics and Market Economics.

Here are the text files (edit: totally forgot about research costs - they will be changed in the next version):

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Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

I suggest that you not continue going through each of the existing trees and modifying it... What we really need to do is re-examine the entire tech tree, including the categories that exist now, and do some reorganization. Particularly for Economics and Construction, I expect the categories to be rearranged somewhat and certainly renamed...

Probably Economics should be just a part of a larger Socioeconomics category, or something similar, which would include a few real-world inspired economics systems (but certainly not just limited to "Planned" or "Market" as that's a false dichotomy and far to limited in scope for a future galactic empire type setting) and also various methods for manipulating or controlling ones own and other empires' populations, and dealing with multi-racial empires.

Construction should probably be renamed to something like Infrastructure with a branch or two for enabling techs like architecture, organic structures, monofilaments, force-field structures, and orbital or gravity-dependent methods, and a few items related to resource sharing on system or galactic scales.

Going through each tree individually also has the problem that it tends to encourage adding more to each tree, without considering the effect on the whole tree. The previously-posted growth and learning trees have 15 theories in them. This is probaby too many. Ships has 32, which is too many, although we don't need to be quite as restrictive in ships given that we'll have several independent branches in that category, more so than in other tech categories.

As for how to reduce the number of theories... In general, there shouldn't be so many cases where a theory is just a delay before a desired application can be researched. If that's all a theory is doing, it might be better to remove the theory, put some of its fluff description into the application, and make the application depend on the previous theory instead.

Also, Bigjoe5 in particular, could you spend a bit more time making sure the connections between theories make some sense? I know you're trying to make the trees have interesting shapes, but a lot of the connections in the current tree(s) don't seem to have any reason given the actual names and descriptions of the techs themselves. I mentioned a few in the learning tree previously, but I'm seeing numerous other odd connections while looking through the tree(s) now.