Help! Ran out of stuff to research!!

[Instar]

What CivII did was you could reseach just to get score points.

[Warlord Adamus]

"Ahhh... go back and read what I said. I didn't say I ran out of weapons to research. Rather, I said that I ran out of 'decent' weapons to research. "

Thanks but I read it right the first time. Any weapon can be used effectively (except maybe the wormhole beam) if applied right. Besides, you can expect to see PPB changed eventually. Decent is subjective. If you researched through PPB and you consider it the only decent weapon then what's the solution, adding 10 more levels, copying MOO's miniaturization idea ? No, thanks.

"Good point. You don't lose the fruits of the research. But you do lose the fruits of buiding lots and lots of research facilities."

And those fruits would be ? Umm, the fruits of the research facilities ARE the techs that are derived from them, not the facilities themselves.

"I think my main complaint is twofold. First, the empire who heavily invests in research facilities is strongly penalized at a certain point in the game when s/he runs completely out of new tech to research. Second, this player is even more strongly penalized because s/he now has tons and tons of useless facilities lying around. Compare this to a player who builds only Intelligence facilities. These facilities have value from the start of the game to the end of the game."

He's not penalized, in most cases he has already out-teched everyone at the point that he no longer has anything to research. At that point he can scrap them by type with the press of a single button, so there are infact no useless facilities lying around, ever. Comparing it to intelligence isn't a good comparison, they have different outputs. And as I said, if the tech is already researched then 'research' is also effective from the beginning to the end, considering you use that tech on your ships.

[raynor]

Warlord Adamus,

I said I ran out of weapons I was interested in researching. You responded that you never ran out of weapons to research. These are like comparing apples and oranges. If I visit a car lot and see 200 cars but none I'm interested in purchasing, then when you ask if I saw any cars, I like, I answer no. You visit the same lot and say: There are plenty of cars there. This is apples and oranges. Your response didn't address my concern. Thus, I suggest you didn't read my response correctly. I apologize if I offended you. But I didn't think we were discussing the same point.

As to research being the fruits of the facilities not the facilities themselves, I'm afraid you've lost me there. All I'm saying is that you have a lot of wasted space being taken up by research facilities once there is nothing left to research. You would agree to that wouldn't you?

Sure, I understand that I can scrap all those facilities. But I don't want to. Am I lazy. You bet! Surely, you can see, though, that even after you scrap those facilities, you are going to have to spend MANY turns building something to go in its place--probably Intel Centers.

[ColdSteel]

I think there are two ideas described here that would be easy to implement by MM and would help ease the situation described.

1) Vary the research rate variable based on the size of the game as I had suggested earlier and klausD followed up on later.

2) When/if you do run out of tech to research, use your research points as part of the race score calculation as Instar suggested. This would assure the continued usefulness of research facilities.

One or both of these suggestions could be implemented pretty easily by Aaron and would go a long way towards filling this gap in the game.

The fact is that unless a proposed solution *is* fairly easy to implement, it's just not very likely to make it into the game.

[Warlord Adamus]

"I said I ran out of weapons I was interested in researching. "

What you said was:


"I think right now, you have a problem in which an advanced tech empire runs out of decent weapons to research about 70 turns into the game..."

Okay, you are saying you personally run out of weapons which you personally consider decent by turn 70. There is a big difference between that and a blanket statement saying there are no decent weapons left to research because you already did by turn 70. Sure you can research PPB's under 70 turns, what's your point ? I'm sure I could research the entire Point-defense tree in under 20. I'm not offended at all, btw.

"As to research being the fruits of the facilities not the facilities themselves, I'm afraid you've lost me there. All I'm saying is that you have a lot of wasted space being taken up by research facilities once there is nothing left to research. You would agree to that wouldn't you?"

No I wouldn't. If having those research facilities enabled you to build all these big, fancy ships with cool components, then how were they wasted when you've used them to their full potential?

If you don't want to scrap them and reclaim that space then that's your fault IMO. Yep, it will take time to replace them fully, but no more time than it did putting them up. Let's face it, if you've researched the entire tech tree you could have won the game a hundred or so turns prior.

[Marty Ward]

Increasing the cost/build time of the reesearch facility could help to. I'm a research nut. If the building took 2 turns to make instead of 1 the pace of research would slow.
Another thought is to have diminishing returns. Have point level where over which additional research point counted at half value, or quarter or whatever.
I don't know about everyone else but I generally research without dividing points. This would encourage dividing points and researching lots of areas at once as the number of points you have increases.

[Warlord Adamus]

BTW, I do agree with you that in a perfect world we'd never run out of new things to research. But I just don't see it happening. Making everything smaller could be interesting until everything is size 1.

A program could have been created that had a single component, example:

Laser Beam I

Size:1
Range:1
Power:1

Now a program could just expand on the numbers for each successive level researched, and change everything to 2 or 3 or 569 but you end up with limitations in tactical combat. Range being one limitation (you can only shoot so many squares), damage being another (You don't need to do 6 million damage to kill a DN). This is similar to what was one the SE4list and what MM was considering.

All that said though, I like Klaus and Instar suggestions as a better solution.

[raynor]

You build intel facilities. They generate intel the entire game. The only time that intel points aren't useful is when everyone is dead and the game is over.

You build research facilities. You resesarch everything. You run out of stuff to research. Those buildings are now useless to you.

The only way you can argue that those buildings aren't useless once you've researched everything is if you think that maybe you have to spend research points to maintain your current tech level. I suppose that might be an interesting idea. But it isn't currently the way the game works.

Once you've researched everything, those buildings are wasted space. I'm not saying they were wasted space the turn before you finished researching everything. I'm saying they are wasted space now that there is nothing more for you to research.

To put it another way, once there are no more research projects for you to create, those buildings are useless to you. If there is nothing to spend research points on, there is no reason to build, upgrade or keep existing research facilities.

I'm gonna keep going until you agree with me on this extremely simple point.

[Marty Ward]

Also, since this is an open ended game you will eventually run out of stuff to research. You could never add enough unique or original items to keep you researching until turn 10,000

[Tomgs]

Hmm atmosphere changers are also useless after the atmosphere has changed but you can also scrap it out and use that space.

Well I guess you could perhaps move a different race onto the planet and see if it changed the atmosphere again .

I understand that a lot more facilities are involved when you talk about research facilities but the principal is the same. Yes it would always be better if there were more areas to research but more can be added by modding them in. You can also make the Phased Poleron Beam less effective in your games so you would want to research other areas.

One problem if infinite technology was added into the game how would you play an all tech game then? The computer would go into an infinite loop, I haven't caused one of those since I studied fortran in college .

Actually my favorite fix for this research problem would be to have a bit of randomness added to the research areas. If you don't know the actual range or damage for each specific weapon each time you started up the game you would have to spend more time researching because the first thing you researched probably wouldn't be the baddest weapon on the block for that game. And if the resource production for mineral miners came out low resources would be at a premium and Organic tech races might do better that game.


[This message has been edited by Tomgs (edited 11 February 2001).]