Public Review: Tech Tree I

Past public reviews and discussions.
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PowerCrazy
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#46 Post by PowerCrazy »

I odn't think that there would be 2 discrete systmes per se. You would have your tech screen that would have the various projects:
Start project X
Start project Y
Start project Z

Stop project A
Stop project B
Stop project C

Refine tech (a drop down menu, or someother equally intuitive method)
Reifne tech
Refine tech.... Etc.

It would essentially be a natural extension of the tech window with very little excess UI elements. And the calculations would be a simple formula based on how far along one branch you are, number of excess RPs per turn, number of refinements you have already, etc. And just like in Moo2 etc. you would have an estimate of how many turns until a break through.

Seems fairly simple to me... but perhaps we are not understanding one another?
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noelte
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#47 Post by noelte »

PowerCrazy wrote:Seems fairly simple to me... but perhaps we are not understanding one another?
Don't you suggest in your posts using HoI model on projects and Moo2 etc. system on refine techs? Don't misunderstand me, i'm not against this.

I know HoI reseach model will be taken for FO, but i would like to see an voting if people like it this way or not.

Ronald.

Aquitaine
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#48 Post by Aquitaine »

tzlaine wrote:By having refinements as just smaller projects that each affect a single application, you will almost always find something to take up those last few RPs you have left over from the big theory and application projects.

It might remove the micromanagement aspect of this model to be able to define an arbitrarily-long queue of tech projects. We could even make the queue smart enough to look past the front of the line if one of the later projects could be started now. That way, "excess" RPs get spent automatically, but we don't have parallel research models. I still haven't heard any compelling reason for having two models.
I think the reverse is true. It is far easier to direct your leftover RP to refinements - a very small subset of the overall tech tree - than it is to micro-manage the last few points. You will be constantly checking the tree and wasting points if they are directed nowhere, although I do agree that it's not strictly necessary to fill this gap with refinements; we could easily direct leftover RP back to your budget as money on some declining scale (so it's not wasted, or rather it doesn't feel like it's wasted, but it's not a profitable way to run your Empire).

I think the refinements (relabeled 'engineering' or something like it) are a much smoother way of doing this, though.
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utilae
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#49 Post by utilae »

Aquitaine wrote:
utilae wrote: Because you have no control over your excess rp, so you would have no control over your refinements.
This is incorrect. Your excess RP is whatever you don't spend on projects. So if you want more excess RP, you don't start new projects or you suspend existing ones.
Oh ok. That sounds good actually. Though the player will need to know that they have accumulated excess rp, to be used for refinements.

If a player had a project going and they clicked 'next turn', then the excess rp would be collected and would be usable for refinements. Though if the player paused a project, then all rp generated in the current turn would be excess, therefore would be usable for refinements next turn.

I assume the player may get some kind of message if projects are paused, eg 'excess rp: 500 stockpiled for refinements'. And what about telling the player how much excess rp is saved when projects are running?
Aquitaine wrote: I think the refinements (relabeled 'engineering' or something like it) are a much smoother way of doing this, though.
I don't know about using the term 'engineering' for refinements. I don't know where it came from, but I don't like it. I always thought refinements would be good enough. Engineering just doesn't sound right to me. :D

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#50 Post by Sandlapper »

I, too, prefer a refinement option. Either an adjacent column or perhaps sometype of tab/button attached to the application once researched. The refinement is simply a alteration of the existing variables already assigned to the application.

If completing research on, say Level one Lasers, with variable attributes like power=50, range=2000, size=60, accuracy=80.

Then first refinement could be Level two Lasers, with a simple across the board 10% increase in all variables. (The increase would/could be fine-tuned by later testing of the game) Note: size would be 10% decrease in this case.

Just a simple loop is needed, if Level two tab =0 (not selected) do nothing, if it =1(selected) then process 10% change in variables, exit loop.

And if you want to keep it simple, do same for Level three,four,etc., a 10% change. Obviously we would review the amount of change more closely, but this is for sake of discussion. We also could exclude some variables from refinement.

I don't know if we need to, but we may want to consider a maximum amount of RP spent on refinement per turn.

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#51 Post by PowerCrazy »

I don't think we will need to limit the number of RPs on refinement per turn. But the 10% (or whatever) across the board bonuses should apply after say 5 lvls of refinement depending on the weapon. That way we could manually program in hidden bonuses the weapons would get after you refined them a few times. For example:

Moo2 Nuclear Missiles. When you first got nuclear missiles, thats all they were. However down the line once you got merculite? or Pulson? whichever your nuclear missiles could be Mirv, Fast, Armored, Eccm, EG missiles. And believe me those were not a pretty combination to my poor Battleships...

Anyway refinement in Moo2 was automatic: the more lvls of tech you got the better your lower lvl stuff got. Basically I'm saying that we make this an explicit player controlled process AND make it more general. Thus we can allow the player to refine lots of things, and we have a useful method for using excess RPs.

We could also tie this into ship refitting [tangent] A ship would only be able to refit refined lasers if it originally had lasers, this would be an automatic free upgrade, but if we wanted the ship to use the new plasma beam we would have to make a new ship....[/tangent]

Cool. Ok so basically we have both, a way to make weapons better by adding new abilities, shield piercing, armor piercing, etc... and we have the weapon get better by a specific factor say 10% on all attributes. When we run out of abilities to add to the weapon then the 10% thing will eventually reach such a negligible gain that no one will bother refining the weapon anymore. Especially if we do an exponential gain of RP per lvl of refinement...

The balancing would be fairly simple, and I think it would add a LOT to the tech tree, while solving the problem of excess RPs, but not adding TOO much clutter to the UI....
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#52 Post by krum »

Wow, four pages already. I should join already before it's over.. Whether we call it refinement or engineering, that both seems acurate and descriptive enough to me, that's the way to go. I also thought of a maximum allowed RP for refinement, but that would create over again the very problem we're trying to solve by introducing engineering. You have 102 RP per turn, you have an 80 RP project going on and you can spend only up to 20 RP on refinement, again you have 2 RP wasted. And I don't see a reason for it, anyway... But that's just me.

About the excess RP for morale and that sort of stuff idea; things like teflon or video games can be regular techs; actually this is part of the way that different playing styles can be provided for. Besides morale, techs like that could also offer you better profit from trade treaties/routes/what-have-we, for example.

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#53 Post by emrys »

tzlaine wrote:I think you are possibly asking the wrong question. The principle question you seem to be addressing is "How do we as game designers ensure that the RPs a player produces in any game get fully used?". I'm not sure why we even need to ask this question, much less answer it. It is part of any 4X game that the player must develop the areas where he can realize the most gain. For instance, in the early game you might want to ignore tech for production, then ramp up tech later. In the midgame you might want to put all your efforts towards getting a key tech, and so basically stop all your production in an effort to do so. These kinds of choices are what make the game.
If I had to define the question I was addressing, I'd probably call it "How do we as designers minimise the temptation for players to attempt to micromanage their RP output and expenditure, and so free them to make strategic decisions about research in the context of the rest of the game".

If the level of "wasted" research is typically going to be only a few percent (i.e. <5%) of ouput, then I agree that the best solution is not to worry about it, and just let them be wasted, because anyone who micromanages to squeeze out that level of advantage is going to do so whatever we do.

However, given the practical requirement that research be only part of the game, I assume we're likely to have at most seven or so projects running at once, and probably much less, with this number fluctuating up and down. The smaller the number of projects, the higher the probable proportion of left over research due to quantisation and inability to spend at a consistent rate, and I feel it is likely that it'll be heading up to 10% or more (it could easily be 20%). Now, if a player is able to make better use of this by micromanaging in some way, they are on course to get the equivalent of a 10% bonus to research, which is well worth having, almost game winning in fact, so I feel the tempatation to micromanage will be too great for most players to resist. Which is why I think we need a solution to this problem.

I just happen to think that the refinement approach is an elegant feeling solution to this. But I agree it has drawbacks.
Sandlapper wrote:I don't know if we need to, but we may want to consider a maximum amount of RP spent on refinement per turn.
The great thing about refinement as by the progressive fractional improvements in stats like you were suggesting is that the limit on refinement is unnecessary, since the benefit of each level/bit of refinement is less than the previous, so spending all your RP on refinement rapidly becomes much less sensible than just doing some real research or shifting emphasis to something else (e.g. conquest or production). In other words it's self-balancing, which is something we should definitely aim for.

Oooh, side point, since presumably we will balance an application's per turn cost (C) and time to completion (T), as a starting point we should make the cost of one refinement step for an application be equal to some fraction/multiple of C*T which will hopefully automatically roughly balance the cost/benefits (forgive me stating the obvious).

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#54 Post by tzlaine »

Aquitaine wrote:I think the reverse is true. It is far easier to direct your leftover RP to refinements - a very small subset of the overall tech tree - than it is to micro-manage the last few points. You will be constantly checking the tree and wasting points if they are directed nowhere, although I do agree that it's not strictly necessary to fill this gap with refinements; we could easily direct leftover RP back to your budget as money on some declining scale (so it's not wasted, or rather it doesn't feel like it's wasted, but it's not a profitable way to run your Empire).
If you let excess RPs go into refinement, you still have to pick the refinements you want as they are researched, or you have to select MOO1-style categories with sliding percentages for each category or something, or you have to make an ordered list of the things you want refinement RPs to get spent on, or let the computer pick which refinements to do with the available RPs.

Whether refinements are small projects just like other research, or whether they are paid for out of excess RPs from other research, you still have to let the computer know that you want to refine beam weapon tech and not cotton candy tech.


As many have said before me, this is not a game-design issue so much as a UI issue. I already suggested a priority queue/list from which all research items (including refinements) can be picked, which means very little micromanagement will be necessary. Just specify what order you want to research everything. If the next thing on the list is too big, the next thing that fits in your current RP budget gets started instead. If you can then reorder, add to, or remove from the list as you like, I think the "problem" is solved (see below for why I put snarky quotes around "problem").
emrys wrote: If I had to define the question I was addressing, I'd probably call it "How do we as designers minimise the temptation for players to attempt to micromanage their RP output and expenditure, and so free them to make strategic decisions about research in the context of the rest of the game".

If the level of "wasted" research is typically going to be only a few percent (i.e. <5%) of ouput, then I agree that the best solution is not to worry about it, and just let them be wasted, because anyone who micromanages to squeeze out that level of advantage is going to do so whatever we do.
I'm glad this is the question you are concerned with; I'm concerned with it too. However, as I said above, I believe that a good UI will reduce the amount of dickering about the user has to do to make things happen.

However, this brings up yet another point. "Solving" this "problem" is what programmers call "premature optimization." We don't know if this will be a 5% problem, as I think it will (not really a problem), or a 20% problem (probably a real problem), and yet we're spending a lot of time fixing it before it is even certain that it exists. Note that we are modelling this after HOI, in which waste is not an issue, as has been noted before.
However, given the practical requirement that research be only part of the game, I assume we're likely to have at most seven or so projects running at once, and probably much less, with this number fluctuating up and down. The smaller the number of projects, the higher the probable proportion of left over research due to quantisation and inability to spend at a consistent rate, and I feel it is likely that it'll be heading up to 10% or more (it could easily be 20%). Now, if a player is able to make better use of this by micromanaging in some way, they are on course to get the equivalent of a 10% bonus to research, which is well worth having, almost game winning in fact, so I feel the tempatation to micromanage will be too great for most players to resist. Which is why I think we need a solution to this problem.
You're making these numbers up. There is no reason to think any of this is how the final game will work. I'm not trying to insult you, I'm just reminding you of the "premature optimization" problem as I see it.


To summarize:

1) I don't think a problem will come out of the small amount of waste we're likely to see. HOI is proof of that.

2) Automatically spending excess RPs on refinements is neither necessary nor sufficient to reduce the amount of micromanagement the user must endure. The things that the "automatic" spending buys still must be selected at some point, and that selection process can be a pain or not, depending on how smartly the UI is designed.

3) Making two systems of picking techs, two systems of spending on techs, etc. is just asking for trouble, both in how easy the game is to use, and how easy it is to write (and thus how likely it is to be written without bugs).

4) KISS.

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#55 Post by Bastian-Bux »

About leftover RPs and refinment/engineering:

I vote for making Refinment the same HoI style as Theory and Application. But: the cost for a refinment should be 20% of the original application. Thus they should by default be much lower then your current ongoing theory/application research.

An Example:

Your empire makes atm 106 RP per turn (increasing by 1 each turn). The last weapon system you researched was Laser for 10*25 RP. At the moment you research Blaster for 10*50 and Autofarm for 10*50.

So you have now 6 (7,8,9,10 ...) RP left over. What to do?

You can refine Laser to Laser II. Thats gonna cost you 10*5 RP per turn.

But what shall we do with the still left over RP? Well, its below 5%, so lets give it to waste. If someone really wants to micromanage them, he can refine some real old techs, down to those that cost 10*1 RP).

This apporach stays in style for all 3 parts of the research, and still has no excessive waste of RPs.

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#56 Post by noelte »

tzlaine wrote: 3) Making two systems of picking techs, two systems of spending on techs, etc. is just asking for trouble, both in how easy the game is to use, and how easy it is to write (and thus how likely it is to be written without bugs).

4) KISS.
Just another idea crossed my mind. Maybe it was mentioned by someone already, i don't remember.

We could simply sum leftover rp and if there are enough, spend them as if they were generated. Meaning:
Having two projects (A,B) both require 10 rp per turn and generating 16rp.

turn 0 => A ( 0rp) , B ( 0rp) , stockpile (0rp)
turn 1 => A (10rp) , B ( 0rp suspended) , stockpile (6rp)
turn 2 => A (20rp) , B (10rp) , stockpile (2rp)
turn 3 => A (30rp) , B (10rp suspended) , stockpile (8rp)
turn 4 => A (40rp) , B (20rp) , stockpile (4rp)
turn 5 => A (50rp) , B (30rp) , stockpile (0rp)

I think it honors KISS, don't interfere with HoI model and no rp are wasted/converted.

Ronald.

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#57 Post by emrys »

tzlaine wrote: However, this brings up yet another point. "Solving" this "problem" is what programmers call "premature optimization." We don't know if this will be a 5% problem, as I think it will (not really a problem), or a 20% problem (probably a real problem), and yet we're spending a lot of time fixing it before it is even certain that it exists.

Whilst I mostly agree with this, I would just point out another programming maxim, which is that the earlier in the development cycle you catch and fix a problem, the easier it is to fix. Problems fixed at the design stage are usually at least ten times easier and quicker to fix than problems that only get spotted after the code is in live use. Plus we seem to have more designers than coders at the moment, so relatively speaking design time is cheap :). So if on a back of an envelope estimate this looks like it might be a problem, it's worth a bit of looking into. (Which is why we're having this conversation rather than Aquitaine saying "who cares" and moving us on :)).
Note that we are modelling this after HOI, in which waste is not an issue, as has been noted before.
As far as I can tell waste is not an issue in HOI because in that game RP are generated simply by adjusting a single empire wide slider, and there are no research related structures / specialisms /infrastructure or other economic investment decisions. This is 'solution' A that I identified earlier ( I call it a 'solution' because the problem doesn't exist if you do this, so it's not exactly solved so much as entirely avoided in the first place, which is good). It's a perfectly good 'solution', but would heavily restrict what we can choose to do in FO, and in fact I suspect it already conflicts with the few temporary choices made so far as far as economy goes (e.g. planet specialisation)
(n.b. This "one big research slider" approach is practically equivalent to a "spare RP goes into some other part of the economy at a 100% conversion efficiency" choice.)
You're making these numbers up. There is no reason to think any of this is how the final game will work.
Yes, completely. This is the 'back of an envelope' estimate I was talking about. I'm a physicist by training and this kind of 'order of magnitude guesswork' is how we're trained to make good guesses about whether something is likely to be important or not, I'm sorry if the approach annoys you. You're perfectly entitled to disagree with the assumptions, the estimate and the conclusions, heck, I do every time I think about the questions differently. A good question is whether you think the numbers I'm making up are "in the right ballpark" or not, and if not what kind of numbers you'd think were more likely.

To summarize:
1) I don't think a problem will come out of the small amount of waste we're likely to see. HOI is proof of that.
HOI has effectively minimal waste because under the HOI economy model it appears to be a trivial exercise for a player to redirect their production if they see a significant waste. The further FO moves from a HOI economy model the less likely I think this is to be true of FO as well, and the more the player may be forced/tempted to fill the gap with micromanagement and complaining. In other words by relying on other parts of the game to evade a potential problem in the research model, I think we will increasing the interdependancy of the design, and restrict design freedom in other parts, which worries me. (Mostly because I don't want to explain to EntropyAvatar/Krikkitone/Aquitaine/You/Others etc. why "you can't do that really groovy thing with the economy, because you'll break the research system".

N.B. I do however agree unreservedly with your points 2,3 and 4.

@noelte: As I see it you're suggesting that spare RP would go into a pot to be used to make up for shortfalls if they occur. Yep, that'd work.

The only reason I don't like this is for pure aesthetics. I like the bit of the HOI model where essentially you have to allocate the RP you produce before it's produced, i.e. when your research gets doen it is research into something, i.e. "the scientists know what they are trying to do whilst they're doing it".

This just seems more like research than the idea of being able to assign research after it's been collected into a stockpile, which has always felt a bit like "put a thousand scientists in a box, let them chat to each other and drink tea, and after a while walk in and say "laser cannons", and one of them will leap up, yell "Eureka", draw a full set of engineering drawings, knock up a prototype using two coffee cups and a blob of plasticine, and then turn to his mate and say "so that's what we've been doing this past year!" :D.

Plus I like the idea of being able to be all Klingon and keep the same ship design for ages, just yelling "build me more like that, but cheaper, stronger, faster and with better guns!" every few years. It just a weird thing I have ...

@tzlaine, would you agree that when I eventually fail to convince you that refinement by spare RP is a good idea, we can fall back on this idea, since It's simple and would alieviate a problem if one shows up?

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#58 Post by Aquitaine »

Just to clarify (trying not to get my own view involved just yet!) --

Emrys is correct about the probability of a difference in excess RP between FO and HoI. In HoI, your Empire's total output changes very rarely, and then it's a simple question of moving a slider to 're-allocate' between production and RP. Since we cannot re-allocate and our overall totals are likely to increase steadily, I do think we will have a lot more excess than HoI does.

And Emrys: I've emailed you and PM'd you about something else. Please let me know with a yea or nay. :)

-Aq
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#59 Post by tzlaine »

Yes, completely. This is the 'back of an envelope' estimate I was talking about. I'm a physicist by training and this kind of 'order of magnitude guesswork' is how we're trained to make good guesses about whether something is likely to be important or not, I'm sorry if the approach annoys you. You're perfectly entitled to disagree with the assumptions, the estimate and the conclusions, heck, I do every time I think about the questions differently. A good question is whether you think the numbers I'm making up are "in the right ballpark" or not, and if not what kind of numbers you'd think were more likely.
I understand that you are only estimating, and it doesn't bother me. I was just trying to say that at this stage of the design, we don't even know the game, much less if we're in the ballpark. If the game is hockey, knowing which ballpark we're in gets us nowhere. There isn't enough context yet for back-of-the-envelope estimation about typical research levels, imo.
1) I don't think a problem will come out of the small amount of waste we're likely to see. HOI is proof of that.
HOI has effectively minimal waste because under the HOI economy model it appears to be a trivial exercise for a player to redirect their production if they see a significant waste. The further FO moves from a HOI economy model the less likely I think this is to be true of FO as well, and the more the player may be forced/tempted to fill the gap with micromanagement and complaining. In other words by relying on other parts of the game to evade a potential problem in the research model, I think we will increasing the interdependancy of the design, and restrict design freedom in other parts, which worries me. (Mostly because I don't want to explain to EntropyAvatar/Krikkitone/Aquitaine/You/Others etc. why "you can't do that really groovy thing with the economy, because you'll break the research system".

N.B. I do however agree unreservedly with your points 2,3 and 4.
And I freely concede that there are enough differences between FO as planned and HOI that comparisons are not warranted. You convinced me.
@noelte: As I see it you're suggesting that spare RP would go into a pot to be used to make up for shortfalls if they occur. Yep, that'd work.

The only reason I don't like this is for pure aesthetics. I like the bit of the HOI model where essentially you have to allocate the RP you produce before it's produced, i.e. when your research gets doen it is research into something, i.e. "the scientists know what they are trying to do whilst they're doing it".

This just seems more like research than the idea of being able to assign research after it's been collected into a stockpile, which has always felt a bit like "put a thousand scientists in a box, let them chat to each other and drink tea, and after a while walk in and say "laser cannons", and one of them will leap up, yell "Eureka", draw a full set of engineering drawings, knock up a prototype using two coffee cups and a blob of plasticine, and then turn to his mate and say "so that's what we've been doing this past year!" :D.

Plus I like the idea of being able to be all Klingon and keep the same ship design for ages, just yelling "build me more like that, but cheaper, stronger, faster and with better guns!" every few years. It just a weird thing I have ...
This is a realism argument. I think we can all agree that a major government spending the exact same amount on research every year, and having an economy with no cycles in it is just as unrealistic as saying that we'll accumulate research.

The fact that you can buy a new technology without any risk as to whether you will be successful in developing it is also asthetically off-putting, but such is the genre. If we could come up with a really novel, richly detailed, highly realistic, yet fun R&D system, I'd love that. Until then...
@tzlaine, would you agree that when I eventually fail to convince you that refinement by spare RP is a good idea, we can fall back on this idea, since It's simple and would alieviate a problem if one shows up?
Yes, I can agree to that. This is very similar to my original, slightly simpler stockpiling idea, if you remember it.

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#60 Post by Sandlapper »

tzlaine wrote:
2) Automatically spending excess RPs on refinements is neither necessary nor sufficient to reduce the amount of micromanagement the user must endure. The things that the "automatic" spending buys still must be selected at some point, and that selection process can be a pain or not, depending on how smartly the UI is designed.
For those that don't wish to micro, put into UI a "Auto-Refine" checkbox; when selected, it opens checkboxes for each category. User selects which categories to auto-refine. User forgets about this for rest of game or comes back and changes as sees fit. AI then simply applies left over RP (if sufficient amount) to these categories, in order. AI selects most recent application completed and refines. If sufficient RP remains, do same to next category, etc.,etc., until insufficient RP exist. This RP rolls over to next turn. No wasted RP. If categories run out before RP, then start over again with the second newest applications until spent.

Additionally, if someone micros the refinement, then lets RP stockpile, we can have auto-refine automatically kick in and allocate and use this RP once a certain amount of RP is reached.

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