Designing The Ultimate Tech Tree

Immortal Wombat · April 8, 2002, 13:11

The Ultimate Tech Tree

Don't know whether this will work or not, but here goes. I'm viewing this as a general Civ Gaming thread, not aimed at any game in particular. If it goes down like a fart in a crowded lift, then I'll start it again in the Civ3 fora, and pretend that's what I intended all along.

In an attempt to find out what the Civ Gaming population want in a tech tree, and in the hopes of some large scale attempt to design the perfect tech tree, here is a series of questions to probe your mind, and stimulate some thoughts.
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1. Starting Date
Choose from:

4000BC - Every Civ game covered by Apolyton, with the obvious exception of Alpha Centauri begins in the fateful year, presumably because sometime, back in the distant days of Civ1, some game designer (Sid himself perhaps) decided that this was when the first nomads in Sumeria or Nicaragua or whatever, got fed up of chasing whatever passed for dinner across the wilderness, stuck the fattest ones in a cage, and then simultaneously, and quite unrelatedly, invented farming and prostitution, thereby becoming civilised. Whether you agree with the aforementioned techie, or are simply afraid of the wrath of Sid, and want to stick with tradition, 4000BC anyone?

pre-4000BC - Maybe you're one of those people who thinks Graham Hancock is an underrated genius, and that the lost civilisation of Atlantis was around 10,000 years ago, and was mysteriously vanished away by aliens in the year 7216BC (or something), thereby accounting for the alignments of the Giza pyramids with Orion's Belt, and the temples of Ankor Wat with the constellation Draco. Or maybe you just think the ancient age is the best one, and needs extending a few hundred turns.

post-4000BC - One city does not a civilisation make. Just because some dude in the desert had the good sense to water his crops, and not wait for the rain, does not mean civilisation started that early - make it later!
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2. Ending Date

pre-1900AD - Buy AoK, and flee in shame.

c. 2000AD - Following in the grand tradition of Civ2, cut the game short in its prime. Er... I mean, end the tech tree in the modern age, and pretend all the scientists died of a fatal illness targeted to the curiosity gene. Leaving only Alabama populated.

c. 2200AD - A bit of future is nice, but spare me the cyber-punk and speculation. Realism is all.

c. 3000AD - To Infinity - And Beyond! Generic "future techs" suck. Give me some substance.

It has been pointed out, that the Dark Ages, a period of some 1000 years, between about 400 and 1400 AD, very little advancement was made in any field of human endeavour, except possibly package tours to the Middle East (single only). If your civ manages to survive the millenia without being ravaged by barbarians on all sides, and allows some tax gold for science (then well done, you can play Civ), and well done, chances are by 1400 you'll be marching rifleman through Babylon or Assyria, and complainign bitterly at their shoddy rail network (or that you can't use it).
Surely to have the tech tree desigined short, it will be dull to research "future techs" by 1800, yet to make it long, you risk not getting to the end of it, and conquering the world with tanks, and so missing out the potential fun to be had with a "XP3000 City Destroy-A-Tron", not to mention the "super-range biowarhead missile laser blaster artillery boomer" and the like.

So in short, to what extent is Civ a game of human history, and to what extent a game of human destiny?
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3. Ages - Yes/No

Sounds like a stupid question, there's always ages in civ games. But apart from a nice little message saying "you have entered the industrial age" and a change of icons every now and again, what purpose do they serve?
Would it be easier to have a continuum of history, with no discrete blocks?
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3. Ages - Which?

If you said YES to ages, you now get to choose which of the ones listed below you would like in your ideal tech tree.

Prehistoric - By definition should not be inlcuded, but you get all sorts of nutters.
Ancient - Egypt, Sumeria etc. Golden age of 'smiting' and living inside city walls.
Classical - Slavery gave the upper classes time to poder more amusing ways to kill their enemies, their slaves, and their mothers. The practical upshot of which was mathematics, science and a whole load of sycophantic poetry.
Dark Ages - In technological terms, more like the lack of an age. About the best thing to emerge from this period was a better type of plough.
Middle Ages - Like the Dark Ages II - different name, same religious bigotry.
Renaissance - Still some debate over whether this actually took place or is merely the imagination of modern sholars run wild, this period was when people again had time to ponder. The practical upshot being roughly similar: maths, science, more philosophies than you'd feel comfortable shaking a stick at, and a whole load of sycophantic paintings.
Age of Reason/Age of DiscoveryAbolition, Equality, Potatoes, and some pretty cool naval warfare.
Industrial Age - Canals, railways, factories, coal mines, steam engines, global empire. No doubt you did something fun in America too.
Modern Age - Depending on your point of view, this starts anywhere from between 1800 (industrialisation) and the early 1900s (industrial revolution over) and ends from between 1960s (computers) and 2020 (eugenics, just you wait...)
Information Age - With the advent of comupting, human beings found lots of new ways to kill each other, on a larger and more impersonal scale than ever before. People insist that quality of life has improved. Labour saving devices have tripled the amount of time people spend doing housework. Digital watches.
Space Age - Similar to the Information Age, but extends later, to c. 2100, when we get manned missions to Mars, and an experimental moon base. Begins c. 1970, and fashion grinds to a halt, leading to a hundred years of white bell-bottoms and square computers. The only saving grace is the absense of MS Windows.
Culminates in the invention of high temperature superconductors, and cold fusion, which presumably combine to form some sort of normal temperature energy device.
Genetic Age - Not just because it is in CtP; the next technological revolution will be biotech. Life extension, gene therapy, cloning, cyborgs maybe, genetic computers, designer babies and foodstuffs.
Nano-Age - Probably the next, and possibly the last foreseeable technological revolution, nanotechnology will bring about super-fast engineering projects, and invisible robots to serve any foreseeable purpose, in fantastic quantities.
'Diamond Age' - As CtP says: The age where the physical and biological fields become united. Cue forcefields, holograms, genetic computers, neural interfaces, warp drives, and sycophancy on a scale that we can't even begin to imagine.
The Future - Insert this at the point of your choice. Involves 10 or so nameless "future techs" that add to your score, or somesuch nonsense.
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4. How Many Advances?

How many advances should there be? Obviously it will depend on the scale of your ideal tree, some might prefer many, quick advances, others fewer, more expensive advances.
For comparison (and not including future techs):
Civ3 has 82
Civ2 has 89
CtP has 102
CtP2 has 106
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5. Linearity vs. Holisticness

I don't know how many people here play Planetarion, but as it seems to be populated by '733t-ist pre-pubescent teenagers, I doubt it is many. In any case, it has (or had when I last played, and realised it was populated by '733t-ist pre-pubescent teenagers) the most linear tech-tree I have ever seen.

Code:

	A -> B -> C -> D
	E -> F -> G -> H
	I -> J -> K -> L

and so on. More of a tech seaweed really.

There are in total about 6 branches (or strands) all remaining separate.
At the opposite nd of the spectrum is a classic Civesque tech tree, where you have to research almost everything before reaching 'the end'. The tree is more tangled than a really tangled thing.

While I feel a certain degree of interconnectedness is important, planning a route through the mess can often lead to little room for strategy, especially if the advances are discovered quite quickly. It just becomes a case of working through it, taking the quickest one, unless you are likely to become embroiled in a long war or something.

In an ideal world, I would like to see three or more different tech trees, almost entirely separate, which the player can choose to research down. However, because humanity only went down one tech tree (mostly), devising the other two is going to be very hard, wthout delving into fantasy and sci-fi.
So a better way would be to have semi-distinct branches of the tree, which relate at important points, and crucially, have one way prerequisites. ie.

Code:

	A -> B -> C -> D
	 \-> E -> F -> G
	      \-> H -> I

Only more complex. That way, each branch becomes an optional thing, and if you want, you can research only the main one or two branches, the expensive ones.
However, I don't know how easy that would be to map onto a real-world technology progression, so thoughts would be welcome.

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6. Occidentocentrism, and Cause and Effect in Civilization

Civ tech trees are very much based on the western progression of knowledge. Mesopotamia -> Mediterranean -> Renaissance Europe -> Industrial Europe -> 'Western Culture' Europe/USA

Is this 'right'? From the point of view of selling games, 'medicine' and 'horse riding' go down better than 'aromatherapy' and 'elephant training', but it seems to be rather selfish. The Chinese had gunpowder centuries before Europeans. According to Civ2 this means they also had Engineering and Invention. So why didn't they build Leonardo's workshop? The greeks had rudimentary atomic theory, without Gravity. And the link between Democracy and Banking eludes me completely.
Do prerequisite chains in tech trees always hold true? Are they real prerequisites, or just models of what happened in Europe? for instance, Currency -> Pikemen. I read that this particular line of logic was true because of the mercenary pikemen running around getting employed in Swiss marketplaces. A nice explaination, but the social and political climate had much more to do with it than just currency, and I think cause and effect are hard to model accurately simply in terms of knowledge.

Ideally, the tech tree would have OR gates in it, eg. you get Pikemen if you have 'Iron Working' (make the pikes) AND EITHER 'Currency' (hire mercenaries) OR 'Feudalism' (emperor's guard)

However, only one game currently lets you do this, so for games designed by people such as the ones quoted in my signature, we can but dream, and pray, and find dodgy workarounds, half-solutions, and the blueprints for small incendary devices.
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7. Other Stuff

7.1 Governments:
Should they be enabled by their own advance, or come along with something?
eg.

Code:

		Democracy. Gives: Democracy (gov)

OR

Code:

		Beaurocracy. Gives: Diplomat (unit)
				    Republic (gov)

Should their advance be an enabling advance, ie. in the main tech tree?
eg.

Code:

		Religion -> Theocracy [theocracy (gov)] -> Cathedral Building

OR

Code:

		Religion -> Cathedral Building -> Catholicism 
		            \-> Theocracy [theocracy (gov)]

Should governmental advances give anything else. I can't see why Communism should give you police stations... I can see a case for Democracy giving the Egalitarian Act, but would it be better with something like Age Of Reason giving the Act and being a prereq for a Democracy advance?

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If I've missed anything out, tell me, and I'll edit it in.

So, answers on a postcard, or just post here:
Starting Date?
Ending Date?
Ages?
Which Ages?
Number of Advances?
Structure of Tree?
Thoughts on Occidentocentrism?
Thoughts on Specific and General Cause and Effect?
Governmental Advances?
Other?

Thankyou for your thoughts.

Felch · April 8, 2002, 15:27

1. I'd go post 4000 B.C., but not by much. Possibly bumping it ahead to 3500 or 3000, and stretching out the time in the ancient era a la Civ 3.

2. I favor a slightly futuristic ending date, possibly 2050 or 2100. Give people time to play around in the post-modern age, but don't let it drag on to silliness.

3. I would prefer it if ages were slightly fuzzier, like with in-between periods giving a little transition. But really I don't care enough to make a big deal of it.

4. I'd go with ancient, medieval, discovery, industrialization, modern, and post-modern.

5. I favor lots of minor advances, like around 100. But every advance should give an immediate benefit, like access to a new unit or building, or something like that.

6. Your branching tree seems good.

7. It targeted to Westerners, and it's the story of a rise to dominance. The West dominates and it's the historical timeline that people are most familiar with. However, it could certainly be adjusted.

8, 9, and 10. I really never thought too much of these, you seem to have a good ideas though.

War4ever · April 8, 2002, 20:40

post modern could also be classified as the "information age" which we seem to be in right now....

no further than 2050 is needed.....

Starting around 4000bc is just fine....

Locutus · April 9, 2002, 19:04

1. Starting Date: I actually like 3000 BCE. That's just around the time the first true civilizations arose, so it makes sense if your game is called 'Civilization'

Also, it works out nicely for the ages, see below.

2. Ending Date: Well, I certainly hate Future techs, so I like going into the future, but I feel no strong urge to play with all sorts of weird sci-fi units either. So 2200-2300 CE sounds about right. It would be cool to have more Future Advances after that but they should have cool names, so Teleportation or Warp travel (I know, very cheesy) instead of Future Tech 7.

3. Ages - Yes/No: The must be some sort of progression from spearman to tank and this is in Civilization one that goes in discrete and clearly defined steps (e.g. Spearman -> Hoplite -> Pikeman -> Musketeer -> Machine Gunner), so sorting these steps in ages makes sense to me. The only thing that I hate is that in all civ-games ages are awfully Western-centric, it would be nice if this could be at least somewhat reduced.

3. Ages - Which: Very hard to determine since very few developments took place at the same time over the entire planet but I would go for:

Ancient: 3000 BCE - 320 BCE (up to Alexander)
Classical: 320 BCE - 620 CE (up to Muhammed)
Medieval: 620 CE - 1220 CE (up to Genghis)
Emperial: 1220 CE - 1520 CE (up to Columbus) - Time of Inca, Aztec, Mongol, Ottoman, Ming, Mali, Ethiopian and Habsburg empires (among others)
Colonial: 1520 CE - 1780 CE (up to Watt/Napoleon) Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, English colonial empires
Industrial: 1780 CE - 1880 CE (up to rise of Germany/Japan/US)
Modern: 1880 CE - 1960 CE (up to space race/microchip/television)
Information: 1960 CE - 2040 CE (up to large-scale cloning/genetic engineering?)
Genetic: 2040 CE - 2100 CE
Nano: 2100 CE - 2200 CE

So the Ancient age lasts somewhat more than 2500 years, the Classical age about 1000, the Medieval roughly 500, Emperial and Colonial both 300, Industrial and beyond all around 100 years. Nice round numbers, just the way I like it...

4. How Many Advances: well, ideally one should reseach something new every 6-8 turns, while the ideal game lasts roughly 600-800 turns, so the game should have about 100-120 advances (excluding future techs).

5. Linearity vs. Holisticness: I like trees where it's possible to specialize a bit, so there shouldn't be too much interdependence, but too linear trees are boring too. Let's say that with 8-10 branches, it should be possible to advance one branch into the next age while a few others advance halfway through the age (to support the advancing branch) and the others hardly advance at all.

6. Occidentocentrism, and Cause and Effect:

I hate Western-centrism. Crossbows and Longbows are NOT Medieval British inventions, Concrete is NOT modern and Gunpowder has been mentioned. Contrary to elephants, horses are an almost global phenomenon so I don't object to Horse Riding vs Elephant Training but the Caliphate is just as good a government type as Monarchy and Angkor Wat deserves to be a wonder way more than the Statue of Liberty.

I like tech trees with OR gates, but generally speaking The concept of technological advancement is way too complex to model realistically in the way Civ does, so weird connections can't be avoided anyway, I don't object strongly to that. However, it *can* be reduced by letting actual historians putting a high-quality tech tree together (such as what happened for MedMod2 for CtP2) and by having OR gates and the like.

BTW, only one game currently lets you have OR gates? I'm pretty sure *both* CtP1 and CtP2 can do this (with SLIC, of course)...

Absolutely LOVE the sig, BTW

7.1 Governments:
They should be part of the rest of the tech tree, to put them seperately leaves less room for other important advances, their always too little room anyway...

Urban Ranger · April 10, 2002, 00:11

Womby,

Can you reformat your message so that it isn't wider than a screen? Thanks.

loinburger · April 10, 2002, 18:36

Starting Date: 4000 BC works for me.

Ending Date: 3000 AD would be nice, but it would also significantly change the substance of the game; it is silly to give anything past 2200 as an ending date without incorporating interstellar colonization, at which point the Earth becomes fairly insignificant in light of the fact that your empire has several dozen planets in it. So, I say 2200 AD (with the option of ending at 2000 AD level tech and making the rest of the future techs generic, i.e. instead of Fusion Power, you'd get a generic power-related Future Tech that slightly increases the efficiency of your regular power plants), unless the game turns into Masters of Orion past a certain tech age.

Ages: Why bother? I could see dividing the game into ages if interstellar colonization were incorporated (the Earth would become much more abstracted past a certain point), but otherwise there's no point to breaking the continuity.

How Many Advances? Lots.

Linearity vs. Holisticness: I'd divide the tech tree into "major" and "minor" advances.

Major advances would be fundamental advances that most civs would eventually acquire ("The Wheel," "Carpentry," or "Engineering," for example), and are almost always the prerequesite for another advance (you can't get "Engineering" without "Mathematic," let's say). Some major techs can be skipped, and there is a fair amount of freedom given for the order in which you research your techs (you might be able to advance quite far in Medicine without advancing at all in Mathematics, for example).

You never need to research a Minor tech in order to continue down the tech tree (minor advances are never prerequesites for major advances, and are rarely prerequesites for minor advances either). These are more applied advances (Civ-specific might be another way of describing them), such as Horseback Riding or Feudalism. Minor advances can often help you out in the short run, but researching too many can slow down your overall rate of tech advancement. Even though Minor tech advances are never prerequesites for Major tech advances (and are rarely prerequesites for Minor tech advances), they can often speed up the rate at which you research Major and Minor tech advances (occasionally to the point that it is faster to research a Minor tech and then a Major tech than to just research the Major tech).

Occidentocentrism, and Cause and Effect in Civilization: It would be nice to have OR gates with the Major tech advances. Minor techs will help to eliminate this problem as well.

Governments: No opinion.

Immortal Wombat · April 10, 2002, 18:44

Quote:

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
Womby,
Can you reformat your message so that it isn't wider than a screen? Thanks.

Done, so long as you post

Quote:

Originally posted by Locutus
BTW, only one game currently lets you have OR gates? I'm pretty sure *both* CtP1 and CtP2 can do this (with SLIC, of course)...

I don't know... whatever. I though the mod_ functions were a SLIC2 addition though? Or is it possible the long way, with return STOP thingummies?

Quote:

Absolutely LOVE the sig, BTW

That Simon Newcombe always cracks me up

Quote:

Originally posted by loinburger
I'd divide the tech tree into "major" and "minor" advances.

That looks like a good system. Kind of similar, only I was thinking of minor advances as minor branches.

Locutus · April 10, 2002, 20:23

Quote:

Originally posted by Immortal Wombat
I don't know... whatever. I though the mod_ functions were a SLIC2 addition though? Or is it possible the long way, with return STOP thingummies?

D'oh! You're right. I was thinking of using !HasAdvance, but come to think of it, I don't think there's a way of actually influencing the build queue from SLIC with it. Not without ugly workarounds anyway. (FE one could use a combination of Is[Unit|Building|Wonder]InBuildList and ClearBuildQueue to kick 'illegal' units/building/wonders out of the queue).

Urban Ranger · April 11, 2002, 02:57

1. Starting Date.
MoM II has a good idea that we can borrow. The player can choose from between 4000 BCE, pre-4000 BCE, or post-4000 BCE. The 4000 BCE is the standard setup. Pre-4000 BCE gives the player less starting teches, or maybe even none, but he has more time to build cities. Post-4000 BCE just gives more starting teches depending on how long after 4000 BCE the game starts. For multiplayer games I suppose a simple vote is sufficient.

2. Ending Date.
c. 2200 CE is fine. If nothing else I don't want too much overlap with sci-fi based games.

<blockquote>"It has been pointed out, that the Dark Ages, a period of some 1000 years, between about 400 and 1400 AD, very little advancement was made in any field of human endeavour, except possibly package tours to the Middle East (single only)."</blockquote>

That seems to apply only to Europe. As one of my professor said, "If you were an alien who visited the earth around the 10th century, you would't go to Europe. It's a boring place."

3. Ages - Yes/No.
Yes. This is to stop a player from exploiting a strategy of uneven development, i.e., attempting to runaway with the game by just making R&D in military advances. Make a number of civ advances a prerequisite to advance to the next Age.

3. Number of Ages.
5 or 6 sounds about right.

Ancient
Middle Ages
Renaissance.
Industrial Age
Modern Age
Space Age

4. Number of advances.
My preference is a large number of smaller advances. This should make each civ more unique. Or perhaps a number of major advances with a number of minor advances. Minor advances are refinements to major advances but are not prerequisites to anything else. For example, one can have Horse Archery as a minor advance. This allows, say, Horse Archers that are faster moving Archers.

5. Linearity vs. Holisticness.
Interconnectedness is the way to go. This fits in well with the idea of Ages and the reasoning behind it. For example, it takes Archery and Horseback Riding as prerequisites for Horse Archery.

6. Occidentocentrism, and Cause and Effect in Civilization.
This is not necessary right, but the West has been dominating in science and technology after the Industrial Revolution. As you know that's when discoveries and inventions started to accelerate.

You are correct that the Chinese had gunpowder centuries before Europe, and they did had Engineering and Invention to some degree.

But what are the effects of removing Occidentocentrism? Will it be a simple renaming of civ advances and having tanks in 1600 CE? Or will it be a lot more involved and takes a lot of speculation of where everything will go?

<blockquote>"Do prerequisite chains in tech trees always hold true? Are they real prerequisites, or just models of what happened in Europe?"</blockquote>

It seems to me that it's more of the latter. But if we are completely revamping the tech tree we can always throw out the old relations.

OR gate is a good idea.

7.1 Governments.

Half of one and six dozen of the other, or something like that

I suppose the thing we really need to look at is whether changing the tech tree will make the game more realistic without taking away the fun. We should always keep an eye on the fun factor and make sure any changes won't distract from it.

BTW Womby, where did you copied that article from?

Immortal Wombat · April 11, 2002, 05:53

I wrote it...

Ecthy · April 11, 2002, 10:36

Quote:

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
MoM II has a good idea that we can borrow.

There is such a freaking thing as MoM 2? Why did noone tell me about that?

Skanky Burns · April 12, 2002, 02:50

Im presuming he meant MOO II.
As in the game that not only has that feature, but has also been coded and released...

fezick31 · April 19, 2002, 16:17

Starting Date Earlier is better. I would like to see an option to start as far back as 6000 BC and then have to research roads, irrigation, & mining

Ending Date Later is better. i wouldn't mind going all "Star Trek" in techs, as long as you could enable win options that went into effect earlier than that. Say 4000 AD at the most, but make optional win points at 2000 AD, and 3000 AD). Tis would make for a long game especially on a huge map (maybe your grand kids can finish the game for you).

Ages i like civ 2's ages better. They weren't as pronounced, and you could advance all the way to the "modern" age and still be completely backwards elsewhere. Civ3's ages don't let you advance until you have almost every tech in that age. I'm not as big a fan of that.

Which Ages I think these would be good: (with different city styles for each)<ul>
<li>Stone Age
<li>Copper Age
<li>Bronze Age
<li>Iron Age
<li>Classical Age
<li>Feudal Age (medieval for Europe, feudal for Asia - I'm fuzzy on Asia history, so correct me if they are not aprrx. equal)
<li>Empirialist/Colonial Age
<li>Industrial Age
<li>Modern Age
<li>Global Age (shift from normal person caring only for local to caring for gloabl issues)
<li>Information Age
<li>Space Age
</ul>
Number of Advances I like the idea of major and minor techs. I would say 50-60 major techs, and maybe 100 minor techs.

Structure of Tree Clump Birch. It should be possible for two civs to be equal in power and rating, yet to have followed two almost unique research paths.

Thoughts on Occidentocentrism Not sure if this would work, but couldit be possible tohave the world advance according to the viewpoint of the civ you are playing? For example, it would be a very different game if you played from the perspective of the Japanese versus the English. Maybe there could be seperate tech trees and ages for each different civ or cultural grouping.

Governmental Advances A separate tree for governements could be interesting, otherwise i would tie them other techs.

Other The above would probably be a nightmare unless you enjoy micromanagement, bt i don't mind it that much. I like really involved games, and the deeper they go into detail, the better.

Myrddin · April 19, 2002, 16:46

Starting date

Happy with arbitary 4000 BC(but this is Occidentocentrist in itself)

Ending Date

Genetic age is fine c2100

Ages

Yes, there have to be enough new ideas, in enough fields to cross-polinate to generate real changes in society. This however is a peripheral matter - you name the ages to fit the design rather than vice-versa

Number of advances

c100, ie more than Civ3, with many optional advances

Structure of trees

This needs enough branches to allow strategic choice of directions, but what those choices should be is a topic in itself (and a major part of game design)

Occidentocentrism

Try to avoid

Governments

Need to be triggered by other advances

Other

One of the parts of SMAC that I liked was the research method, where you could pick a field for research, but not the topic, which is a far better simulation of how development comes than the linearity of Civ3

civman2000 · April 21, 2002, 09:54

I enjoy micromanagement

Immortal Wombat · April 21, 2002, 18:14

So that means many cheap advances, or many branches to choose from...?

loinburger · April 22, 2002, 21:20

Another issue that I think ought to be included in a good tech tree is:

Tech Synergy: Diversifying your tech research among various fields will have the effect of possibly producing a synergistic increase in your rate of research. Different tech fields will have different relations to other tech fields ("Biology" and "Mathematics" might be 50% related, for example, while "Art" and "Mathematics" might be 5% related, and "Physics" and "Mathematics" would be 90% related). This relation level affects the likelihood of a synergistic tech increase as well as its magnitude. (For example, if you place 10 tech points in "Mathematics" and 10 tech points in "Physics," after the synergistic increase you would effectively have, let's say, 14 tech points in "Mathematics" and 12 tech points in "Physics;" place 10 tech points in "Mathematics" and "Art" respectively and you'll probably receive no bonus.) Probability and magnitude of synergistic tech increase is also affected by your relations with other Civs (if you trade ideas and good freely with several Civs then your synergy increases, if you have closed borders then it suffers), as well as how freely ideas flow through your society (partially due to culture, e.g. a culture that embraces ambition might have scientists who are more likely to be secretive about their research and who would therefore not benefit as much from tech synergy as a culture that embraces knowledge for the sake of knowledge and/or perfection; this is also partially affected by your government type or by how paranoid you are of spies, e.g. a democracy would ordinarily have a high chance of synergy due to freedom of speech, but if the government is extremely paranoid then synergy will suffer as many citizens would rather stay silent and avoid the hassle and embarassment of a government probe). Various techs will also become more/less related as they progress ("Biology" and "Mathematics" might be 10% related in ancient times, but in modern times with the advent of Bio-Informatics this relation factor would dramatically increase); minor techs especially might have a large effect on the level of synergy between two or more major techs. This also presents an interesting quandary when attempting to figure out the optimal balance of where to put your tech points: for example, field A and field B are 30% related, so putting 10 tech points into field A and B respectively will result in 12 points effectively being put into both techs; however, putting all 20 tech points into field A might effectively reduce your total number of tech points by 4, but it will also allow you to research the next advancement in field A much more quickly, and it might well be that the next advance in field A will increase the relation factor betwen fields A and B to 80%, which would increase the synergy between the two fields such that the increased number of bonus tech points will more than make up for your sacrificing 4 bonus tech points previously.

This ought to make tech research so bloody complicated that having a Ph.D in mathematics will guarantee that you squash your poor math illiterate opponents.

Bleyn · April 23, 2002, 04:47

1. Starting Date

Around 4000 BC.

2. Ending Date

Around 2200 AD sounds good. I'd like to see a little more depth in the future tech but not much.

3. Ages - Yes/No
Hmmm...
I'd have to say yes, even if it is just mostly a graphical change. I mean it would look really silly if the cities were all still mud huts when you had tanks and jets.

3. Ages - Which?
Ancient
Middle Ages
Industrial Age/Age of Reason/Age of Discovery Same time period really. Very intertwined.
Modern Age
Information Age/Space Age Again, very intertwined period.

4. How Many Advances?
Maybe 100 or so. Both Major and Minor. But every tech should have some improvement, unit, change, or something related to it. Even the future techs.

5. Linearity vs. Holisticness
Definitely a holistic tech tree of some sort. Among the things I wouldn't mind seeing are different tech trees for different civilizations, and seperate research of major and minor advances.

By different tech trees, I mean that if you choose to play the Aztecs that there are certain techs you might have that only you can research, and certain ones that you can't research. And they would be different from the Russians or the Chinese. And that is not to say that these techs would have to be so unique that no other civ can have them, but that if they want them, they have to trade for them or capture them. It would also be somewhat realistic.

As for seperate research of major and minor techs, the idea is thus... The major techs are the ones that are required for advancing through the ages, and you can only research one at a time. Minor techs are not required for advancement, and perhaps are not even completely required to get other techs. They might be minor improvements or variations on a theme such as the archers/horse archers idea someone mentioned. As part of this perhaps you could be researching one or more minor techs at the same time as the major tech. I dare say, I wouldn't mind if there wasn't even a limit to the number of minors that you could be working on, except perhaps that in general the more pans you have in the fire the longer it takes for everything to cook as it were.

Playing into this could also be that having more of the minor techs researched could pay off later in causing other techs to cost less than their base rate. To use some techs from Civ3 in an example, lets take Free Artistry and Ecology. Free Artistry would be a minor tech that dead ends. Ecology would be a major tech on the main line. The idea is that if someone has researched Free Artistry they could eventually get a reduction in the research cost of Ecology. The reasoning... the arts are and for many centuries have been a core aspect of a liberal arts education. This same sort of education also tends to encourage the person to think about the world around them in some fairly abstract and philisophical manners. If a civ has Free Artistry, then there people would be more likely to think philisophically, and when they were researching Ecology that philisophical/abstract thought mode would synergize and speed up the research. (its not a perfect example, but I think you know what I mean).

6. Occidentocentrism, and Cause and Effect in Civilization

As you might guess from above, I'm not 100% bound to having a Western oriented tech tree. Different tech trees for different civs would be cool.

Another way of varying things that comes to mind is having techs that mean different things to different civs. One example that comes to mind is gunpowder. IIRC, yes, the Chinese had gunpower for much longer than everyone else, but they didn't really use it in warfare to any extent. It was much more a thing for making fireworks and firecrackers for more peaceful, "cultural" purposes. It was the more western peoples like the Turks who saw its potential for mayhem. So perhaps gunpowder might be an early minor tech for the Chinese, that when they discover doesn't imediately give applications for warfare. Perhaps it is a major tech for other civs, but one that they have to wait much longer to get to on their own. It could even be set up such that if the chinese traded gunpowder to another civ, they end up with their form of the tech, and perhaps after a certain time could trade it(or another tech back), thus resulting in an advance for the Chinese of the major tech sort.

Another example of this would be the Aztecs/Mayans and the wheel. They knew about it, they just didn't use it in a fashion anywhere near that of most of the rest of the world.

Pedrunn · April 23, 2002, 10:56

Ages

As i saw in school, the division of ages is according to the way the economy goes by. If i am not confusing names it was Marx and Engels that implemented the concept of Ways of Production (dont know if this is the exatly name since i am translating from portuguese). As i sid is the related to how the economy interact with the needs of a certain population. They even divided the ages with this concept. According to them ther is four age.
Ancient - From the development of writting (4000 BC) to the fall of the roman empire (469 AD)
Medieval - From the fall of the Roman Empire (469 AD) to the conquest of Constatinopla by the Turks (1459)
Modern - from the conquest of Constatinopla by the Turks (1459) to the France Revolution (1789)
Contemporary - from the France Revolution (1789) to nowadays.

I heard that english colonized do not accept this last agebecause it start in a France related event (The France Revolution -1789). But this is how we divide here in Brazil. I did made interpretations to add more diversity and a better gameplay. So here is my idea of how ages should be divided. And how i plan to implement in my Absolute State Mod for CTP2. In this mod what you change is the Economic System (way of production) since it comes from the idea that in civ/ctp games the human interacts as a dictator, a Absolute King. Democracy seems unreal since you decide even in wich tile a worker will harvest or where should a farm be build.
Start in 4000 BC is quite ok for me but i wouldnt mind a game starting in pre-history or in 3000 AD.

1) Ancient Age 4000 BC - 1500 BC (Estimated/rounded)
---Marked by the formation of the middle asian societies, like Egyptians, Hebrews, Babylonian, etc. They had a society in wich the citzens lived controled by theocratic governors in a relation of coletive forced work bust still keeping their rights (Servants). This was called the Asian Way of Production but to keep the universalism i called Coletivism. In Game: From the development of Wrtting to Philosophy.

2) Classical Age 1500 BC - 500 AD (Estimated/rounded)
---This is a characteristic of the mediterranean societies like Roman and Greece. This period i history is included in the ancient age. Yet i insert since it happened in the late Ancient age. It was based wich the economy was moved by the work of a Slaves wich had no rights. I called Slavery (since i am not english born should i call Slavism?) In Game: From the development of Philosophy to Feudalism.

3) Medieval Age 500 AD - 1500 AD (Estimated/rounded)
---The fall of Rome started a new era wich had the Frenchs in the main character. When Magno divided his power with the Feudal Sir (Is this name right?) giving the territory so that they could control. The King became representative needing to ask/beg for their help. This system based on the work of servants for the Feudal Sir was called Feudalism. In Game: From the development of Feudalism to Nationalism.

4) Modern Age 1500 AD - 1800 AD (Estimated/rounded)
---The kings had very little power in the Medieval Age. So to restore their power they allied with the Burguesy (Merchant Class). Demand the centralization of the power in their hand. It was the Absoltism in the politic branch (national States) wich had the Mechantilism as the economic couterpart. This system was based in the primitive acumulation of capital (Metalism). In Game: From the development of Nationalism to Industrial Revolution.

5) Industrial Age 1800 AD - 1950 AD (Estimated/rounded)
---This should be the conteporary age since i want to go after this age i did changed the name to become less contraditory. It started with the prove that the Iluminist ideals were the best option like the division of the 3 powers, liberalism and freedom of speech. Started by the US in 1776 but marked in a eurocentric view by the French Revolution in 1789. Wich is marked by the Capitalism that different from Primitive Accumulation of Capital of the Merchantilism it advertise tha the best way to gain money is spending it. The need of investments. In Game: From the development of Industrial Revolution to Computers.

6) Information Age 1950 AD - 2100 (Estimated/rounded)
---This was my idea to have this age based on others games and mods. The development of mass media, transports and communications after II GM was huge. And led the world to the current state of the capitalism characterized by the globalization and Neoliberalism. It is our real-life current age started with computers.

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Future Ages and Endig Date

Now we are going over a very contraditory aspect that really depends of the person who is playing and the game porpouse.
The creator has a high demand of creativity to come up with ideas that many wont like. In CTP2 (wich is my game) the future goes with Genetic and Diamond. But i did not think genetics was that important in the game to bve a total change in military, science, production and economy. So i changed it to cybernetic and added the Future Age. Yet you could add Nano Age, Space Age, Eco Age, Nuclear Age, Anti-Matter Age, InterDimensional Age, etc ... And you we will never achieve a point on wich one is the best. You will never please someone. So i do think that we should leve for a while and try to design the Ultimate Tech tree until a few decades after this on (I would say 2100 AD) but i do think that the games has to go over 3000 AD to be good
--Pedunn

Pedrunn · April 23, 2002, 12:40

Governments

I like to think of civ/ctp games as a simulation of a nation controlled with ironfist. We do control even how many hour a day your people should work, how much money they gain and even how much food the receive! How happy they should be!!!

. Not to mention what should be build in a city and what to research without asking permission to anyone.
So i do like to implement Economic systems. In the last post i showen some economic systems (Ways of Production). And will give others here that i think should be implemented.

Subsistence - Pre-historic Comunities.
Coletivism - Acient Egypt, Babylonians, Meso Americans
Slavery - Romans, Greeks, Africans, Arabs before muhamad
Fundamentalism - Calvin Swiss, Afeghanisthan today
Feudalism - Medieval Europe, Feudal Japan
Merchantilism - Renaissance Europe, Arabs after Muhamand
Capitalism - Most of the countries today
Socialism - URSS, China, North Korea, Cuba
Totalitarism - Fascism, Nazism, Salazanism and military dictorships
Neoliberalism - I dont know any totally noliberal nation (Asiatic Tigers?)
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Corporativism - Cyberpunk scnarios of nation controlled by multinationals
Ecotopia - From CTP2, based on ecologic aproachs
Technocracy From CTP2, controlled by scientists (better name?)

Any suggestions?

dunk · April 23, 2002, 15:07

Quote:

Originally posted by Immortal Wombat
Starting Date?
Ending Date?
Ages?
Which Ages?
Number of Advances?
Structure of Tree?
Thoughts on Occidentocentrism?
Thoughts on Specific and General Cause and Effect?
Governmental Advances?
Other?

Start... 4000 BC is fine. There weren't very many cities around before this. 5000 - 4000 BC is when SOME people stopped wandering around and built permanent settlements.

End... Selectable.

Ages... Selectable.

Which Ages... All of them, but you can pick a set of them to play through (obviously, they would need to be chronological). This would be good for scenarioes. For example, you can only play in the Industrial Ages for an American Civil War scenario. That way, research can be allowed but it will never leave that era if you don't want it too.

Number of Advances... As many as possible without having a tech pop up every turn. 2 - 3 is ok by me.

Structure of Tree... I like your model.

Westernism... If you're going to use ages, they have to be based on some kind of culture. People mention gunpowder. The Chinese didn't use it much for weapons. That's what we westerners did. If there are no ages, only military units become an issue with this. But then again, muskets can't exist without gunpowder, ocean-faring ships can't exist without a navigational system, swords can't exist without Iron Working.

Cause and Effect... Some of the buildings, units, and techs are linked to seemingly odd things simply for game balance. There would be too much money in the game if Banking could be discovered right after Currency.

Government Advances... Some governments are philisophical ideas in their own right. ie, the Republic is ok as a tech, but it should also allow Democracy. Communism is also a philosophy in its own right, so that's ok to be a tech. I think Despotism should disappear with the discovery of Polytheism or Ceremonial Burial and simply become Monarchy. I mean, a clever despot would simply declare himself "King" and claim he was chosen by the gods once an organized religion was established. More governments would be fun, but with the current model, new ones wouldn't add much to the game.

Other... Bananas!!!