SE IV Gold: Starting tech levels? Yes or No?

[Captain Kwok]

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Any news??

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Not yet...hopefully soon though...

[Captain Kwok]

The idea of starting tech levels is not necessarily to upgrade the AI's performance...it's more for roleplay and/or scenarios really. You know, create a game, set up some races and give them various levels of tech based on their description - say advanced cyrstalline weapons for the Phong or maybe the Terrans have developed powerful missiles. It helps to 'flesh' out the game just that much more...it could make more competitive between players of different levels...

There's far more good than bad I think and it's more feasible than tcp/ip tatical combat...

Look...

Each race file already has settings that record the level of tech that race has achieved. All that would have to be done is allow that information to be edited/set during the game setup. Also, it wouldn't replace the current low-mid-full tech options, it would supplement them.

[geoschmo]

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Originally posted by suicide_junkie:
Or, you could create a racial trait for "Starts with Fighter tech Level 2", just like my nomads in P&N.
Repeat for all the different techs, and after a ton of work, you never have to do it again: just pick different racial traits rather than different mods.
This would be easiest on the short tech trees, and hard but possible for even the "prerequisite techs".

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S.J.,

This idea intrigues me, but I am confused by your suggestion. It appears to me that you would have to create a parallel set of components and tech areas that are equivilent to standard fighters, but with the bonus of having fighters right off the bat. (Not a bad thing, in fact I am thinking of making a mod to do this exact thing. But it sounds like you are saying there might be an easier way.)

I don't see any way of allowing acces to the standard figter tree by racial traits, without making it impossible for any race to get to fighters without the racial trait.

Could you elaborate on this a little?

Geoschmo

[Lastseer]

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Originally posted by [K126]Mephisto:
I don't think that it will be included in the gold Version. It would require code changes and therefore play testing. And unfortunately GOLD is running out of time if we want to meet the release date.

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Starting techs should be very easy to implement. Just let unused tech points carry over from turn to turn. Then allow the number of starting tech points to be configurable from the game options screen.

This way players can pick what starting techs they want. The only side effect of this method is Generic Tech level 5 would take 5 turns to get by carrying tech from turn to turn.

[ 17 December 2001: Message edited by: Lastseer ]

[Suicide Junkie]

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This idea intrigues me, but I am confused by your suggestion. It appears to me that you would have to create a parallel set of components and tech areas that are equivilent to standard fighters, but with the bonus of having fighters right off the bat. (Not a bad thing, in fact I am thinking of making a mod to do this exact thing. But it sounds like you are saying there might be an easier way.)

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What I was saying was that doing it by racial traits is easier than trying to change the starting tech levels for each player, or having the GM play the first 20 turns just to research tech.

To keep things simple, we should allow "Starting tech 3" plus research in the normal tech to add.
Starting propulsion 4, + propulsion 3 should give Jacketed Photon Engine I's (level 7).
Note that purchasing starting techs will lower your research costs in that level! (That is offset by racial point expenditures)

You would have to duplicate all the components, and you might have the odd effect, such as analysing a "medium fighter (+1 level)" would only get normal races the small fighters.

What you need is one new copy of every component affected by each racial starting tech option.
Having "Fighters +1", +2, and +3(max), would involve making 3 new copies of the fighters plus the carriers (if you want). Going into dangerous detail, you'd also have to copy the fighter engines, the small weapons, etc.

It would be best to write a program to do this for you, since anything with multiple tech requirements will explode into lots of copies. (eg: four fighter engines. These split into 16 due to the four levels of fighter tech. Those split because of engine tech into 4*1 + 4*12 + 4*12 +4*12 = 148 fighter engine components.

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Ion engines require only engine tech level 1, so they are independent of engine starting tech. 4*1.
For CT engines, each fighter-tech copy requires 3 new copies for engine starting tech 0 to 3. We still need 9 more copies with no propulsion requirement, for the starting tech traits 4 to 12.
Same with the more advanced engines.

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Writing a program to do this would not be too hard. Given a list of the tech areas you wish to make purchaseable, it will scan the txt file, and copy anything that requires the given tech, adding the racial trait requirement and reducing the normal tech requirement.

I could write up a utility to do all of that (modify racialtraits.txt, components.txt, facility.txt, intelprojects.txt, techarea.txt, vehiclesize.txt), but the main problem might be an overflow in SE4 (we can only load 65,536 components, right?)

[geoschmo]

Ugh. Well maybe I can come up with a simplified Version of that.

Here's my idea, and any of you that would like to have starting tech levels feel free to post your opinions.

For lack of a better term I am calling it the Accelerated Tech Mod.

The exsisting techs will be unchanged, but for several of them there will be an Accelerated Tech Version that you can get at game start by spending some racial points.

So far the categories I am thinking are fighters, mines, and troops. Say 1000 racial points for each and you have the ability right from the start to build level 1 equivelents of each without having to research the prerequisite Construction theoretical science or the level 1 applied tech. This would save you about 100K of reasearch in each case, say about a year of research time in a single planet low tech start.

Also, as a option I will have an accelerated tech tree for point defense and minesweepers. For those that don't neccesarily want to spend all the racial points, but dont want to get overrun in the first 6 months by a fleet of carriers and fighters. These counter techs will be available at say half the cost in racial points of the others. 500. That may change.

Also, if you want accelerated mines, you don't get minesweepers. You have to buy both at game start, or research them the long way. Same thing for fighters/point defense.

Also I am thinking that the Accelerated tech trees should top out somewhere not as high as the regular ones. If you want to go higher you have to research construction, or military science or whatever. That idea is still being worked in my mind.

Suggestions?

Geoschmo

[Suicide Junkie]

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Ugh. Well maybe I can come up with a simplified Version of that

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The trick to the method I described is to write a program to do all the work for you.

[Mark Walton]

Just out of interest,

What would happen if you set up say, Fighters as racial tech X, but then after the initial game setup, changed the data file so it is no longer racial tech?

Example: In initial gamestart TechArea file:

Name := Fighters
Group := Applied Science
Description := The construction of fighter vehicles and their support components.
Maximum Level := 5
Level Cost := 100000
Start Level := 1
Raise Level := 0
Racial Area := 20
Unique Area := 0
Can Be Removed := True
Number of Tech Req := 0

Which reverts to :

Name := Fighters
Group := Applied Science
Description := The construction of fighter vehicles and their support components.
Maximum Level := 5
Level Cost := 100000
Start Level := 0
Raise Level := 0
Racial Area := 0
Unique Area := 0
Can Be Removed := True
Number of Tech Req := 1
Tech Area Req 1 := Construction
Tech Level Req 1 := 1


So we set up a trait granting racial tech 20, player gets fighters. As soon as the game starts, we switch the files - then everyone can research it.

OK maybe I could test that, but I'm tired at the moment.

[geoschmo]

Neat idea, but I don't think it will work, for the same reason you can't open an .emp file that was created using a different Racial Traits file. The game can't open it. I tried it and got a "Cannot open test.gam" error message.

Of course I could have done something wrong.

Geoschmo

[Mark Walton]

It seemed to work in my test - important thing is, don't change the racial traits file back, only the tech areas.

Did a quick test; my "fighter" race was able to create and design fighters even after the tech was switched back to non-racial. I'll do more tests later.

Edit : Quick further test

1. Other races can't use the tech unless they choose the race special, until they research it (I know that was the idea, but it was worth testing!)

2. The tech cannot be futher researched until the "real" prerequisites are known. At this point the tech is just "there" as if it had been researched normally. (If you wanted, you could do the same trick with "Construction" and get players to choose both, then they could research from turn 1)

3. Haven't tested trading the tech (yet)

4. Have to decide at start what tech level any players will get (ie can't have one player choosing tech level 1 fighters, another player choosing level 2)

This gives us possible options for the regular racial techs... needs some experimentation but we may be able to make them tradable / learnable / researchable.

One thing I'm doing in my mod is making the current "ruins" techs into normal techs with extreme research costs. So, a player can research Neural Combat Nets (but it's probably prohibitively expensive). Most often, players will get that tech by landing on a ruins world (not a unique one, just a regular one, and getting lucky)

I might try combining this idea with the racial-startup ideas here.

One test; can we research techs which have our "special" tech as a prerequisite, even if we haven't learned the tech-reqs for our special tech?

[ 19 December 2001: Message edited by: Mark Walton ]

[ 19 December 2001: Message edited by: Mark Walton ]