It seems that I indeed did insult you, and for that I offer my fullest apologies, as it was in no way my intention: I was entirely unaware of the pejorative meaning that the word copypasta carries - maybe I should stop trying to write a higher level of English than I can master.
I reluctantly agree with these arguments, but though I can't remember right now other elements of the wide corpus of bioships in Space Opera apart from the aforementioned Orbital (and tales that my older brother used to tell us when I was young) I still feel that livings hulls stricto sensu (i.e symbiotic, not purely "bio") are at least one way to go - and they're different from Zergs (which would be the model for "bio" ones).Oberlus wrote: ↑Thu Jun 20, 2019 8:46 amMy feelings are different.LienRag wrote: ↑Wed Jun 12, 2019 11:41 pmIf I may have a say about that: Biotech is NOT Zerg! Please don't make the Organic Hull line a Zerg copypasta...
I'm not opposed to the idea of being a Zerg-like hull line in FreeOrion (I do think that like in Starcraft it would be better if reserved to some species? Definitely not Humans for example), but the Organic Hulls imho refers to a wide corpus of bio-oriented Space Opera (like in Sylvain Runberg's Orbital) and I really wouldn't want these symbiosis-based ships (i.e. organic hulls but non-organic weapons) oblitared by a Zerg-like line (that are not symbiotic but beasts of their kind, all-in-one hull, armor, weapons, and engine).
The fact that current living hulls are just the same as any other hull with the label "living" is boredome. I don't know how can you call that "a wide corpus of bio-oriented space opera". Make them actual living beings instead of organic machines is what gives them flavour. So praise Zergs/Tyranids!
But yeah, zergs and tyranids can be cybernetic too.
Oberlus wrote: ↑Thu Jun 20, 2019 8:31 amYou'll have to beg for that on your knees
Nah, it's a joke. My idea is to allow for organic living hulls to mount some non-organic weapons, but only once you get enough cybernetic techs, you know, to blend organic and inorganic tissues.
Also, the solar concentrator will go to Crystal theme, so organic hulls won't get any special advantage from lasers.
I liked the way that solar concentrators were tied to both lasers AND organic hulls, as it made these symbiosis aspect more than pure roleplay but actual game mechanisms (and also made going for Robotic Hull less of a no-brainer).
If you remove them from the bio line I'd appreciate very much (and I think the game would profit from it) if other symbiotic-like mechanisms could be implemented.
I'm uneasy about your idea of requiring cybernetic techs to mount non-organic weapons on organic hulls: it's both a very good idea and a setback (imho) from what we have now.
Could there be living hulls that need bio parts (and as such require cybernetic techs to mount non-bio parts on them) and living hulls (I'm leaving aside the dead ones like Static) that accommodate non-bio parts from start?
Or maybe bio slots and generic slots on the same hull? How cybernetic techs would modify what can be done with bio slots I leave to you.
Like a war elephant has both tusks/trampling feet and metal plate armor/archer tower on its back?
I think indeed that pursuing the symbiotic reasoning to its consequences, and as such tying the bios and organic hulls (whatever they will be) to species characteristics, would be very interesting, but that can wait for later releases (even be postponed to 1.1 if need be).
To clarify things, I'm not necessarily speaking of allowing only certain species to use them (though I would not be adverse to forbidding some species to have bio ships at all), more of creating synergies: some species would have only some hulls or some ship parts, or would get boni/mali with some hulls or some ship parts.
Actually I was in a hurry at the time I wrote this reply (which is my sole responsibility, I acknowledge that) and at a loss about how to explain again what I just explained one post earlier. If you had pointed to what you didn't understand or just, as you did now, explained that you didn't understand my explanations it would have clarified that I needed to explain differently what I had previously explained.
Oh, and apparently I misunderstood the word "overflow" too, so yes my idea would produce quite a lot of overflow and force the player to navigate his strategies around that.
The basic idea is that I consider that we need to allow for combining themes (nonetheless because it's mathematically easy to prove that it gives more variety to the game than going monotheme) without making theme-switching without consequences (else there's no real "theme" and we're back to where the game is right now).
Rewarding the player who stays on a theme by allowing him to access higher tiers early (as I understand the current tier proposal) is a simple and interesting way to approach that, but it's still prone to later-game ability (and as such encouragement) to research at little cost all the low-tiered techs of all themes.
So, yes, I do like the current research system more, and I'm not the one who decided to change it to a tiered and strictly-themed one, but once that change has been decided, the current system doesn't work anymore.
Also, I don't like punishing mechanisms like those you mentioned earlier (though now that I re-read them I'm not certain that I actually understood them).
So I thought that an elegant solution could be just tweaking the current system a little bit, but with (imho) interesting consequences.
I'll try to explain in detail how it would work: let's say we have 5 themes A B C D E and for each of them a number of techs, such as A1 would be the first tech of theme A and C3 the third tech of theme C.
The player' queue is A1-A2-C1-A3-C2-E1-A4-A5-C3
Excess research for tech A1 will pour into A2, if there's still excess it will pour into A3 (not C1) and so on.
When A1 and A2 are acquired, C1 will start being researched (as it got no research at all that far).
Excess research will pour directly into C2, not into A3.
Which means that A3 will not get researched anymore (if it wasn't acquired before the end of A2's research process) until C1 is acquired.
Again, if there's still excess it will pour into C3, not any tech in between.
When C1 is acquired, A3 is researched and excess pours into A4 and eventually A5 if there's enough of it.
When A3 is acquired research resumes on C2, and when C2 is acquired research starts on E1.
If there is excess and there is no researchable E2 in the queue, excess is wasted - maybe the player should have timed E1's research differently.
Having research overflow (now that I understand what you meant) pour into the next tech of the same theme achieve many things (note that by "next tech" I mean the tech that the player put next in the queue, not a hardcoded order):So you can switch any time the current theme you research, right? So the only thing which changes - is not allowed to research tech from multiple themes. Also huge research production (more RP than you can spend on the current tier in parallel) leads to wasting research (lets call that over-overflowing)?LienRag wrote: ↑Fri Jun 14, 2019 11:07 pm there would be no overflown resources since it would have gone to other Techs in the same Theme. Wanting to complete the research of Techs in Theme B after finishing researching a tech in it or preferring to go back to the more important Theme A would be up to the player.
So the cost to researching multiple themes here is that you can't progress in another theme using overflowing RP. Compared to now you would probably waste time and RP on tech you do not want. I think we wanted less of this. Also the over-overflowing of RP is a step backward.
- It doesn't change the way the current system work as long as you stay in one theme, which is a behavior we want to reward
- It's quite easy to understand even when occasionally switching theme, and easy to represent in the UI (just greying the techs that are in-between but not researchable due to not belonging to the current researched theme, as are techs with unfulfilled requirements in the current system)
- It allows theme-switching (which we want) but make it a real choice with consequences to it (which we also very much want)
- It doesn't really remove the variety of research strategies but rather makes the player think hard about which one to pursue, as the overflow would not be wasted per se (as it will be there when the player will resume research of this theme) while still being useless for the moment if the player does not pursue with the same theme
- It creates a real cost for researching techs of different themes even when their RP cost will be trivial, as it will pause the research of the main theme
I am not sure that over-overflowing would appear if the player builds his research queue carefully, and if you still consider that a problem I think it's quite easy to avoid it by giving each Theme huge RP-absorbing techs early (so that by sticking to a few themes one can reasonably hope to acquire them at a time or another, but switching themes too often would only delay that).
I don't consider that there are techs a player doesn't want (with a few exception), rather techs that a player wants less than others.
My design would indeed force a player to think whether he really wants a tech from theme B bad enough that he'll consume RPs into other very secondary techs from theme B, or stick to theme A and get higher tiers techs earlier.
BTW, has it be considered that not all techs need to count towards unlocking higher tiers?
That could help balance the theme-switching too if some nice techs do not help unlocking tiers (so, if they are not in your main theme, they're sort of a dead-end)...
Well, I was referring to the "deletionnist" movement among wikipedia editors, which started with some reasonable positions (basically aiming for "random page" to provide more often than not topics of interest rather than obscure nerdgasm about the third admiral of the fourth fleet of the fifth planet of a second-rate fiction show) and now runs totally amok, deleting stubs before anybody has a chance to ameliorate them (the usual process of building wikipedia) or claiming non-notability of anything they don't personally know."wikepedia-style deletionnism" - What? I am not sure what you are talking about. I am talking about that I do not like an artificial inflation from 100 to 300 techs. And that I prefer a e.g. 50 tech tree to an 100 tech tree if it leads to a comparable playing depth/experience. Half the number the techs means a quarter of required maintenance. I do not oppose "good" tech, i do not care about "wacky". But even in the current tree there is a lot of uninteresting tech. And many suggestions for new techs i read about are on that level.
Note that you locally can add as many techs etc as you like using FOCS.
Not saying that you're comparable to these evildoers of course, but that good intentions can bring bad results...
I didn't think about FOCS and maybe plugin-style tech trees could be a possibility (a skinny tech tree to your liking and proposed FOCS scripts to add fluffier tech trees in a simple and intuitive manner)?
I'm not in favor of it (as I already wrote, I'm in favor of as much techs as possible as long as they do no make the game unbalanced) but I hear your arguments about maintenance.
And I guess that a "colder" gameplay (less techs and as such more predictability of research paths) can have its appeal to some players.
Imho though, lots of techs bring lots of fun as it overhelms the player with possibilities - I can understand how you could consider that an issue rather than a boon though - and that is very effective to create immersion, while running out of techs breaks that immersion (like Civ's "future techs").