FreeOrion

Maybe it should auto refine any way. The player has to add an application into the list of techs to be refined. Techs in the refinement list will get refined automatically, unless the techs are taken out of the list. Excess rp will be spread between techs in refine list (? if that is ok). So if you have more techs in the list they would all get an equal amount of excess rp each turn. So if you have one tech in the refine list, then it will get all of the excess rp per turn (as much as is aloud of course).

This would happen at the end of the turn, so the player could go in and spend some of the excess rp (for that turn investing the maximum amount into a tech) and then what ever is left over is split equall among all techs to be refined.

Haha. Return of micro problem. I hope you all remember that AI can't solve any micro-problems. If you can't read ppl's mind and interpretate every game situation.

I think the simpliest solution is just funnel back into the economy. You can say that all planets produces pp and that you get food, min, and rp by converting from pp. It makes for easy logistics and solve our excess rp problem.

Another possible viable idea I have is make excess rp have some strategic effect. So, instead of making the problem an design concern, we can say that you get interest from any rp you have in the stockpile so players might want to deliberately save up from some huge project to get ahead in that cat. Or we can do something like keeping x rps in the stockpile gives some sort of reward like discounts. Of course, I support dumping excess rp into refinement/engineering for x rp/ 1 turn.

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skdiw wrote:



How so? In my auto-refine proposal, at a minimum, you simply select auto-refine, then if you wish, completely forget about refining and wasted RPs forever until end of game. This is as anti-micro as it gets.

The system is not designed to read people's minds or respond to varying game play. It desides which category is next, which application is most recently completeted, then selects refinement for it; that's it, no more. If sufficient RPs remain repeat for next category in line. When there's insufficient RPs, then roll it over to next turn. nothing wasted.

If the player wants something in paticular refined, fine, uncheck auto function and micro it.

If you want a better selection by the AI, then pre-assign a weight to each application, then AI simply selects the 'heaviest' or more desirable application to refine. But this is much more involved to implement(as to selecting one application over another in weight).

Also when you are refineing its either "on" or "off". You don't select what refinements to make, you simply say "Refine lasers GO!" and then when you are at uber mega blaster you might feel you want to change it from refineing a "laser" to refineing the uber mega blaster. Of course You don't have to but at that point you are essentially wasting RP. Though you are getting somesort of gain, its just tha you don't use lasers too much.

Then assuming something similiar to the above is adopted we can have research bonuses based on how many levels of refinement you have in each of the lower categories. That way it will feel "worthwhile" to actually refine lasers. Or if you are creative or equivalent you might just blow off refinement and keep going for the bigger and better stuff. But in this way refinement opens new branches of gameplay, but doesn't feel like a burden.

Or we can make refinement more broad. And you can refine a single field say "weapons". when this is on you are spending x% of your RP per turn on refining "weapons" and you just leave this option on and your weapons get better...

OR even more generally we say refinement GO. And x% of rp (perhaps player defined)is spent per turn on general tech refinement. Sort of a surprise grab bag. When certain RP lvls of reached a refinement is "discovered." Thus there is no micromanagement, and there is soemthing to do with excess RPs.

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Aquitaine is my Hero....

The details of how exactly to allocate a refinement system if that's where we channeled excess RP are beyond the scope of this review. Save that stuff for the next round.

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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!

Was wondering when you were going to say that...

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Aquitaine is my Hero....

Sorry. I should just have it auto-post that every couple pages...

but this stuff has to be tightly reined in or else it's impossible for me to translate it into an actual requirements doc.

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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!

If we have racial bonuses for specific cathegories, that issue seems interwinded with the isse of number and type of cathegories. What kind fo racial bonuses do we want? Cathegory-based or maybe they could be even preferences towards different apps steming from the same theory?

I hope this Fits with this discussion if it does not do with this post what you must.

I was thinking about spare RP's there might be a way to add another option besides just refinements.
Your choice would be to invest the RP's in refinements that give you a known result or you put it into your Tech Purchase account then take that account and send those RP's out to the Alien merchant or wait until he comes to your planet and the merchant will take your RP's and sell you device technology that never shows up on the tech tree ie.(Shield/cloak device). The tech the merchant would sell you is totally random so it it becomes a sort of space lottery. This idea is a complete rip off of the Stars! merchant ship concept.

Or how about with spare RPs left, you can partially research something, but it isn't an effient as paying for the whole thing. But if you don't use it, you lose it, but have happy, idle scientists.

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"The one perfect impossibility is perfection."

A summary of this thread so far:

Decisively answered:

• Absolute cost in RP and time for projects; this cost may go down through events or other tech but, relative to the MOO series, is fairly immutable
• Multiple projects may be researched at one time
• Projects may be suspended and resumed later with no penalty
• The last project started will be the first project automatically suspended if your RP count drops below the necessary level
• An option will be included at game start to set a research time/cost multiplier (with a reccommended setting for various galaxy sizes). There was a realism argument against this (: shoots utilae but all of the arguments made go away if you leave this in control of the player; some people will play with 'normal' settings regardless of galaxy size (like utilae, and myself, actually) while some people will want this to scale.
• There will be no 'random' element to the tech tree that blocks certain tech; however, specific modules may allow or disallow certain specific techs to certain races. Similarly, it will not be possible to research applications without fulfilling the pre-requisites, although of course alternate means of getting technology (such as spies, events, or diplomacy) do not require you to have pre-requisites.

I suggest that we use something similar to EU2's 'campaign' file to set suggested parameters for modules. So if skdiw wants to play with certain techs blocked out, he adds a few lines to the campaign file; so this is easily and delibirately done, rather than randomly.

Open questions:

• Spare RP allocation / Handling refinements
• Broad categories / Specific categories (alternately: many/few)

Note: There was some discussion about the UI that I have disregarded. While we are free to make suggestions, game design and interface design are two very separate disciplines, so I would rather limit our focus to 'how the game should work' and let the graphics folks work on the design.

The major issue that was discussed is spare RP allocation and refinements. There seems to be consensus that spare RP should be directed into a sort of 'engineering' pool (we don't have to call it that - I call it that just because it's related to but separate from 'pure research' which is really what the tech tree is about).

There was a suggestion that these 'engineering' refinements should be more like MOO2's minituarization rather than refinements in the sense we've been talking about them, which actually provide new functionality (the equivalent of continuous, armor-piercing, rapid-fire, etc. in MOO2).

Procedural note: Both tzlaine and Tyreth suggested entirely new ideas for this question, which, in a public review, is supposed to be verboten. So we need to either rework our decision making process or actually follow the rules, fellow team leaders, sir. However I'm not married to the rules so let's change them if we want.

It is not necessarily the case that the player needs to be prevented from starting a new project simply because he has an existing project on hold. A 'dusting off' cost was suggested for projects placed on hold for too long, but I think this is a game balance issue that should wait until we're actually balancing everything at v0.9. If people are abusing this (and I've never heard of anyone abusing it in HoI) then we can deal with it at a later time.

Some suggestions were made in various forms (and some by me in the design thread) of letting people start a project with fewer than the required number of RPs if they met some other condition (racial bonus? excess RPs from previous turns left over?). The criticism of this is that it violates KISS - the 'cost' is then not a simple cost, it's a 'cost if x is true and y is false,' and so I've been won over to the pluarility on this. The research-oriented races may have other advantages: they can both produce more RPs and have exclusive techs available to them, perhaps that reduce the cost of whole categories.

About category names:

I think Tyreth presented a good argument for 'few categories, and general ones' although the consensus leans (barely) in the other direction. Specifically, one reason people are against many categories is clutter; this is a UI issue (but a fair one to think about). In strictly gameplay terms, people wanted specific ones. This remains an open question, and I will argue my side of it in a following post.

So as for what happens now:

We need to hammer out a few details of the 'spare RP allocation.' tzlaine brought up some good objections about interface/dual logic. I have a couple suggestions on how to make this very simple, because I think having this semi-parallel systems is an elegant solution to many things, but it does put us in danger of violating KISS; however, doing nothing also raises the temptation for micromanagement, which we definitely want to avoid. So I will give my two cents on this (which I've withheld so far) in a following post.

The next two posts I make should give you all a good idea of what we need to do before closing this thread. If you feel I've unjustly closed one of the questions, PM me about it and I'll reconsider it (as this took me all morning!)

-Aq

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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!

On category names:

My arguments in favor of them:

- Usability (not UI, but related). If I'm an FO player and I haven't been working on the project at all, and I think I really want to research corvettes or shields or a new monetary system, I have to guess which of Tyreth's categories those are in; and in many cases, there is more than one possible answer; perhaps most weapons are in a 'physics' category. What if I have one weapon that's a biological weapon? Should it be in phyiscs or biology? This 'organization by overlying scientific principle' seems counter-intuitive to me.
- Modability. If I don't like part of the tech tree and want to completely redesign it, the use of specific categories in the parent FO design allows me a lot more flexibility. If we design our UI to support 5 or 6 very broad categories, then modders will have a more difficult time if they decide they want specific categories (between 8-12 seems to be our target number). This is not a reason to do anything in an of itself - obviously a modder can change the UI - but it is a consideration.

To refute Tyreth's arguments:



I think I already argued against #1 - we can name theories and advancements whatever we want. I don't see a 'game immersion' factor anywhere in here, because I don't see that choosing broad or specfiic categories ties us to using 'better' sci-fi names for things. I agree that Super-Tensile solids is a better name than Super-Surreal Laser. But I don't see that it's relevant to this discussion. But FWIW, I think the quotes in SMAC's tree were pretty great, and I'd love to do something like that.

As for #2, the whole progression of the 'theory' subcategories is supposed to be about the underlying scientific advancement.

-Aq

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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!

Here is how I envision handling refinements / spare RP allocation (an implementation of the idea already floated):

The majority of the UI on the research screen is devoted to the pure research section; to handling categories, viewing information about specific tech, and seeing what you've got in progress. One click on this screen changes the main portion (the 'categories' section) to a list of things you've already got researched that can potentially be refined. Your only task on this screen is to prioritize them; a certain ratio of your refinement pool of RP is split among some number of these things (perhaps three). They need not all be weapons; I very much liked the idea of having things like Tang come up (maybe more as flavor, but that's a nice immersion feature). When you have nothing in your refinement pool and something opens up (either through research or some other event), it gets automatically put in there; if we arbitrarily assume you can be 'refining' three things at once, then everything else gets put on a wait list and all you have to do is drag things to the spot where you want them.

How this split is handled needs to be determined - is it arbitrarily 50%/30%/20% or do we let the user control it with a slider, or is it just always an even split (so if you only had one thing it's 100%, two things 50% each, three things 33% each). The key idea here is that this whole screen is secondary to your main task of researching, and so you should not have to spend much time on it; nevertheless, the results of this screen can be important enough to give an edge to one race that might otherwise be on a similar level in technology to another.

At any rate, what I'm after is not making this a wholly separate system that needs a lot of attention from the player, even if it does require a parallel system in the code (but it should still be a fairly small system.)

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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!

Good stuff.


This made me think. An rp not put into research, goes into refinement. So, it would be stupid not to use the rp (now in refinement), as there is no way to put the rp in refinement back into research.


The even split idea sounds the best. I think it would be the easiest to use.


I would hope that refinements can be as important as research, so you could have a player who researches lvl 1 techs, and then just refines them all heavily. So, as long as you don't have to choose a tech to research, all of the rp is excess and is put into refinement.

Also, I think that refinements should not just include miniaturisation, but also things like armour piercing, continuos, etc. Refined techs can be thought of as increasing the level of a tech. So a tech is level 1 at application and through refinement gains levels. Maybe at level 10 laser 'learns' armour piercing. See, it would be really cool (like an rpg game character, heh ).

I agree with Aquitaine and Utilae on both issues.

The excess RPs into refinement give the options of being very good at old tech or moving on to new ones. You could even have one research race be more creative and another better engineers. Creative might have bonus to base tech research and engineers a bonus to refinements. This with a well balanced tech tree will naturally give way to multiple paths or styles.

I think the categories should be more game specific. Like weapons, propulsion, defense, etc. This will aslo lead to differing strategies, like high in offence, low in defense for example. Races could have bonuses to certain ones, like the Mrrshan of old are better in weapons, and so would be encouraged to focus there. Catgories like these will allow more specialization and variation. Broad ones like physics force you to be more well rounded than you may want to be. Of course, Psilons would probably be well rounded as opposed to deep in one category, in this proposed system.