Primitives for proportions?

[narf poit chez BOOM]

would it be possible to fake system defence only ships using fighters, or do i need to get more sleep?

[geoschmo]

Quarian, what you are describing now is possible. It's pretty much what Dogscoff was laying out in his initial post. The main difference being it sounds like you are are wanting the primitives to be able to eventually make it to space on their own rather than having to wait on a major race to come along and uplift them. That is certainly doable.

Geoschmo

[Katchoo]

(Expanding on the talk of Radioactives and the ability of a Primitive Race to produce/maintain them...)

Would it be possible to create a Sat component that generates Rads from the Sun? An advanced race could have access to this kind of technology, and as one of the first things to gift to a Primitive Race to help them advance. This would provide a pre-requisite for giving Ships to a Primitive Race, since without Rad Production the Primitives can't sustain Ships.

Down the road the Primitives can gain access to more efficent Rad Producers, and eventually reach a level of "competence" to maintain more powerful ground-based Rad producers.

Sound feasable and/or worthwhile?

[QuarianRex]

Geo:
I'd rather not have them do it on their own. I like the idea of them having zero research points. That way significant reseach would take centuties (ie. longer than any reasonable game) without the uplifting influence of a more advanced society, and their research points.

I think that it would be extremely sweet if the highers level of primative tech opened up all of the other techs, hence the questions about trading same-name tech areas of differing origin.

As for high-end weapons and such how about giving them lowered Versions of DUCs and CSMs (lets call them Rail Guns and Advanced ICBMs) whose highest values are equivalent to, or just below, those of level 1 DUC and CSM.

Fighters with zero strategic move would be a great starting tech for a space race. Other techs should also be lower than equivalant starting techs. How about space stations weighing 100, 200, and 300kt. Weapon Plats at 100 and 150kt. Sats at 40 and 60kt. Fighters at 5 and 10kt (remember, you don't have to put engines but some inherent supply would be nice). Infantry with weapons that do 1 damage, boosted to 2 at steam.

Hmm... I might try to work on a basic tech tree over the weekend...

[PvK]

Originally posted by QuarianRex:

quote:

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Originally posted by PvK:
QuarianRex, the game does know the difference between components with the same name.

I wasn't specific enough. I meant tech areas. If you had two racial techs (say for normals and primatives) with the same name for both (say ship construction) could you trade those racial techs? Does the game tech areas with the same name but different origins to be the same tech area?

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I think not. What it would do is make other human players unable to tell during play exactly which racial trait was actually held by the empire, but the computer would still know the difference, because it refers to the racial tech area number, not the name. Actually though, I haven't tested tech sharing in that scenario, so you could try and see, but I don't think it will work.

Unfortunately, SE4 works on logical-AND requirements, and not logical-OR requirements, and techs don't actively give other techs, and you can't research a racial or special tech area, so therefore... you can't have a tech area (or a component) which can only be reached (or even accelerated) from two different techs.

So I think the only way to get get empires that start a game at different points along the same tree would be to duplicate components (ugh).

However, that's only really necessary if you want human players to be able to play the primitives, and to enforce their research rate.

With AI-controlled races, they are stuck with their pre-programmed research path. Therefore, you can program them to research "steam tech or whatever" for a long time before going on to "space tech or whatever", and get the same effect you were talking about.

PvK

[dogscoff]

I'd rather not have them do it on their own. I like the idea of them having zero research points.

I've just thought, is zero research actually possible? I know you can't get zero resource production because the game gives you a certain amount of "free" resources per turn if you lose all your production capacity.

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by PvK:
However, that's only really necessary if you want human players to be able to play the primitives, and to enforce their research rate.

With AI-controlled races, they are stuck with their pre-programmed research path. Therefore, you can program them to research "steam tech or whatever" for a long time before going on to "space tech or whatever", and get the same effect you were talking about.

PvK

PvK, I think that this is a brilliant deduction and makes this whole idea a more practical possibility. You don't need to have separate racial traits at all. You simply have the exsisting tech path that everyone plays on start much earlier in the tech tree than it currently does. Everybody basically starts then as a "primitive race", only the human players know what to research to get to star farring status fairly quickly. The AI would be programed in their research files to not go for the certain "breakthrough" techs that would open up the areas needed for space race status.

Since these breaktrhough techs wouldn't be racial techs they would be easily gifted to the primitive AI and they would be able to upgrade and research farther.

For example. Ship construction. Instead of that being a root tech you make a pre-requisite tech for it and don't tell the AI to research the pre-req. Tell them to research ship construction though. They can't until someone gives them the pre-req. After that they can progress normally.

You could work several levels of these "breakthrough" techs into the research tree so there could be several distinct types of AI primitives. Everyone starts out as stone age. You could program some AI to advance to industrial, some would be left at stone age. All by telling them whether or not to research the specific breakthrough techs.

Another nice thing is that once this expanded tech tree is worked out, you could set up the "breakthrough" techs so that they start out at level 1 in a medium tech game. Then a low tech game would be truely low tech with primitives included, but a medium tech game would be what we are used to now, where everyone is at the level of being able to make space ships and no primitive races.

Geoschmo

[ April 28, 2003, 13:06: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[geoschmo]

In fact, the more I think about this, the easier it might be. It's possible we could set this up so the AI need little or no manipulation from the stock AI files. Since they are already programmed to research the various techs. All we need to do is add some pre-reqs to those techs but not tell them to research the pre-reqs. For the AI that you want to develop to a certain point (industrial tech) you give them a couple breaktrhrough techs to research, but not all of them.

Limitiing the AI to zero research points won't be needed. They can have all the research points they want, but they wont have anything to research for the most part. Until they are uplifted.

For those that you want to get their on their own, just much slower, you can add some do nothing filler research techs that they have to research fully before they are allowed to go for the breakthrough techs.

Geoschmo

[ April 28, 2003, 13:39: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[dogscoff]

Geo: Great stuff. I only see 2 problems:

1> (I think) the AI is hardcoded so that once it runs out of things to research in its AI file, it will just research anything. I think.
This could be worked around though using "dummy" techs.

2> Cultural centres might cause a bit of a headache. Everyone would start with the same cultural centres, which might mean spending the first 50 turns of the game upgrading your 18 dirt-tech tree-villages to high tech super-cities.

But yeah, it's an excellent idea. All we have to do now is come up with all the new components, facilities and things for the primitives. I might post something along these lines later.

[geoschmo]

#1. I had no idea about. I had heard they would reasearch mines if they encountered them, but didn't know they would randomly pick stuff when out of techs in their research file.

#2. Would only be a problem for proportions obviously. While that was the topic of the original post, I don't see this primitive idea as being limited to Proportions mod.

Geoschmo