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Number of techs? (I'm talking to you fellow tech mods)

Posted: Wed Jan 12, 2005 4:09 am
by PowerCrazy
The techs we have been coming up with are great and all, however, where does it end? i.e. How many levels of tech will we have. If every single tech does +1 to maxMeter i guess we are goign to have 100 tech levels?

I'm thinking since we have limited resources as far as art etc is concerned we should probably keep the level around 30 maybe less. I'm sure many of you have seen Geoffs tech tree but I find it a little too short, and not convoluted (exciting) enough, but it is a good starting place.

So what are your thoughts?

Posted: Wed Jan 12, 2005 5:12 am
by Geoff the Medio
Just to be clear, my tree suggestions are just theories... I'd assumed people would be suggesting applications / refinements to stick under those theories, expanding the tree greatly, with lots of interesting combinations of theories and other applications required for the new techs.

I'm a bit confused about whether you want more or less techs though... You want 30 or less "levels" (a maximum) but what I have suggested is too short (less than a minimum)? Are these ideas related? (I don't follow...)

Posted: Fri Jan 14, 2005 7:54 am
by PowerCrazy
Well I was assuming your tree was complete. I count 5 levels of tech. So yea that is too few.

Make sure you realize that levels are different then indivdual techs. A tech "level" is made up of all the techs you have researched at a certain amount. Say all techs that cost 30 RP for 5 turns make up a single tech level. Thus when you have researched all the techs in all the various branches that cost the same or approximately the same that is a tech level.

So with only 5 levels it seems a little brief for a tech tree. What you may be thinking about are epochs or ages, where there are a variety of tech levels in each age. But at this point we are talking semantics.

So my question to you and all others involved is this: How many techs per category do we want? I'm thinking 50 as a maximum and 25 or so as a minimum. But I am open to suggestions.

Posted: Fri Jan 14, 2005 8:58 am
by Bastian-Bux
Actually the 5 steps are ok. We might even use them as base for 5 "ages".

Posted: Fri Jan 14, 2005 9:33 am
by Impaler
I'm not shure we have any Plan for a standardized progression of Tech Costs say for example Level one Theories cost X over Y turns, Level twos are all W or Z turns ect ect.

I have nothing against this and infact I think its a good starting point, I assume its all done manualy be giving the Tec that value on the data files and giving it the apropriate pre-requsites. Their isn't any actual "Level" value in the data sheets and we could if we wished arbitrarily assign any number to any technolgy field.

Over all I like the ~12 Theories per School. I figure 2-4 (average of 3) Aplications per Theory and ~ 10-20 linear Refinment levels on each Aplication much like Diablo 2 Skills.

That gives us 12 x 10 (remeber their are going to be ~5 Military Schools as well) = 120 Theories. 120 X 3 = 360 Aplications. 360 X 20 = 7200 seperate Refinment levels.

This is Rougly comparable to Diablo 2 which has 7 (classes) x 3 (skills tabs) x 10 (skills per tab) x 20 levels each = 4200

Posted: Fri Jan 14, 2005 12:41 pm
by drek
PowerCrazy wrote:Well I was assuming your tree was complete. I count 5 levels of tech. So yea that is too few.
Funny, I was just thinking Geoff's tree is too big. Who's going to flesh out all the levels/techs/etc?

We don't need hundreds of techs--we just need a semi-balanced working tree to hand off to tzlaine for v.3.

Posted: Fri Jan 14, 2005 5:17 pm
by Geoff the Medio
Are tech levels just the group of (theory) techs that share the same cost?

If so, why does it matter how many tiers there are?

(I don't expect people to research all of a tier before any of the next... Rather, I figured there would be lots of options and redundancy in the tree, so you can skip large chunks you're not interested in or get the equivalent benefits of from other chunks.)

Posted: Fri Jan 21, 2005 7:35 am
by PowerCrazy
I was thinking that "tech levels" were techs that were all availible at about hte same time. There is no game mechanicn that restrcits you to a certain level or anything. In moo2 you had 8 category's and each one had three techs per level. Each tech cost the same and unless you were creative you could only get one tech per tech level per category.

Basically when I say tech level here I'm talking about the total number of techs, and what a good upper bound on the number of turns/rps.

Should a "final" tech cost 30 turns and 1000/rps/turn or what? We need to get a number down for the end game techs so that you or I (hopefully) can come up with a good scale for tech costs.

i.e. the next "level" of techs will cost 50 more RP/turn and take 5 more turns etc. etc.

Oh and Geoff thanks for all the work you've done so far.

Posted: Fri Jan 21, 2005 8:00 am
by Geoff the Medio
PowerCrazy wrote:...total number of techs, and what a good upper bound on the number of turns/rps.

Should a "final" tech cost 30 turns and 1000/rps/turn or what? We need to get a number down for the end game techs so that you or I (hopefully) can come up with a good scale for tech costs.
I really don't understand why you (or Aq) are worrying about the exact (or even rough) numbers of RPs that techs will cost right now. IMO the actual number doesn't matter... What matters is the number of techs researched simultaneously, which depends on both the RPs produced and RP cost of techs. There's basically no way we can know the latter right now...

For v1.0, it will depend greatly on all the other game content and balance, and even on whole game systems we haven't even started to design yet.

For v0.3, we can make it pretty much anything we want depending how many turns we want it to take to research the whole tech tree... IMO it doesn't really matter how long it takes, as long as the number of techs available and being researched at any given time is reasonable (less than 10 probably) and the total time isn't any more than 300 turns or something (to make testing reasonably easy to do).

If we go with 200 turns to [edit]get[/edit] 75 techs, that's an average of ~2.66 turns / tech. If we research 5 techs at a time, that's an average tech research time of ~14 turns or so (ie. 5 techs simultaneously for 14 turns, all 5 techs finished at end, on average). So if early techs take 5 turns, then each level increases by 5 turns over the last, we could have 5 tech levels of 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25 turns each, with 15 techs per level, to get an average time to finish a tech of 15 turns, which is pretty close. More likely we'd have a few more early techs, so make we could bump the late-game techs to 30 turns to research to compensate.... or maybe add a few 50 turn techs at the pinnacle of the categories.

As for RP costs, as above, IMO it doesn't matter right now. We can correct it for balance purposes after we have a tech system set up to test balance with. Obviously a goal would be to have about 5 techs being researched at any given time, given the previous paragraph... Getting that to work correctly will probably also require a well thought out correction factor for galaxy size (see the relevant brainstorming thread).

Edit: It occurs to me that 75 techs is a bit low for the whole tree for how things are looking, so I'll save the above analysis by saying that it applies to the number of techs actually researched by the average empire in a long game, but there can be more techs in the tree than are actually researched every game...

Re: Number of techs? (I'm talking to you fellow tech mods)

Posted: Sat Nov 05, 2005 7:59 am
by starman
PowerCrazy wrote:
I'm thinking since we have limited resources as far as art etc is concerned we should probably keep the level around 30 maybe less. I'm sure many of you have seen Geoffs tech tree but I find it a little too short, and not convoluted (exciting) enough, but it is a good starting place.

So what are your thoughts?
You must be craizy.. only 30 lvls?
You want do the same wrongs as World of warcraft?
They do 4500 MB of code but do horible tech tree!
There you can have only 45 lvls but no choose! The magic is limited by lvls and you buy it. You not choose in fire magic, or teleportations, you must be the same stupid character as onother one whu have same profession.

Dont do the same wrong!

Posted: Sat Nov 05, 2005 8:39 am
by starman
Impaler wrote:
Over all I like the ~12 Theories per School. I figure 2-4 (average of 3) Aplications per Theory and ~ 10-20 linear Refinment levels on each Aplication much like Diablo 2 Skills.

That gives us 12 x 10 (remeber their are going to be ~5 Military Schools as well) = 120 Theories. 120 X 3 = 360 Aplications. 360 X 20 = 7200 seperate Refinment levels.

This is Rougly comparable to Diablo 2 which has 7 (classes) x 3 (skills tabs) x 10 (skills per tab) x 20 levels each = 4200

7200 isnt too much.
In diablo2 is stupid example, because you was limited by programators. When you wanted strong, you must asked first experienced players who is stronger and choose it. I choose necromancer and estate that 60% my skils are on nothing. When i want did super skeletons, i was disillusion with limit 20 lvl.

diablo 2 is good example how do miserable tech tree.

If you dont want skeletons on 120 lvl, do somethig else what is same strong and cheeper, but dont take this choose player.