Help! Ran out of stuff to research!! - Page 4

Warlord Adamus · #31 February 11th, 2001, 07:05 AM

raynor- You are missing the point. Of course having tons of research facilities around *after* you have already researched everything don't help you. But, you should have scrapped them before then. Your whole assertion in this thread was that empires that focus on research especially are penalized, my view is that they are not.

Your intel comparison doesn't cut it, as the missions are canned, single level operations. The lone programmer can not input a limitless amount of techs so that the research facilities are totally useful throughout the entirety of 'raynor's' game. As I already mentioned, if you've researched the entire tree you should have already won by then. The other solutions on this thread are fine.

raynor · #32 February 11th, 2001, 08:08 AM

There are two points I've been making here. The first point is: I want more research fields. I think the best way to get more research fields is to make very expensive techs that take many turns to research but which result in smaller components.

The second point I've been trying to make is that if there isn't anything left to research, then there should be *something* to do with those research facilities. Don't expect me to accept the 'Oh, just scrap them then' argument anytime soon.

raynor · #33 February 11th, 2001, 08:12 AM

quote:
You are missing the point. Of course having tons of research facilities around *after* you have already researched everything don't help you. But, you should have scrapped them before then. Your whole assertion in this thread was that empires that focus on research especially are penalized, my view is that they are not.

Nope. My first point was that I wanted more research areas. My second focus was the creation of open-ended research projects that generate intel points.

quote:

Your intel comparison doesn't cut it, as the missions are canned, single level operations. The lone programmer can not input a limitless amount of techs so that the research facilities are totally useful throughout the entirety of 'raynor's' game.

I think the point I was trying to make about the intel projects was along the lines of what to do with the research facilities--i.e. create a reseach project that generates intel points so that intel facilities aren't useless after everything has been researched.

raynor · #34 February 11th, 2001, 08:15 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Instar:
What CivII did was you could reseach just to get score points.

Just wanted to quote Instar so that some of you who only read the Last message by Adamus could see that we were at one point *actually* talking about something to do with research facilities other than just scrap them once everything was researched.

raynor · #35 February 11th, 2001, 08:28 AM

quote:

The lone programmer can not input a limitless amount of techs so that the research facilities are totally useful throughout the entirety of 'raynor's' game.

This is an essentially false statement.

It is extremely easy to add a very small number of extremely expensive research projects which produce identically featured components which are smaller than the originals. If the cost for each project is exponentially more expensive, certainly, it will be possible to eventually research them all. But if the cost of these 'Advanced' technologies is ten times as much as all the other technologies in the game combined, I would argue that you are 'approaching' limitless technology.

(And yes, I'm gonna create these myself--with the help of awesome folks like SunDevil, Tampa_Gamer, etc who are amazingly willing to help folks like me create weird stuff. Just gotta finish my formation editor, then the component editor, then...)

klausD · #36 February 12th, 2001, 12:16 PM

raynar
I dont think that minimizing components is the solution for "eternal" research. It was once a good try in MOO2 but in this game everything was fixed and not editable.

Thankfully in SE4 you can add an awful amount of new and very advanced techs to the tech tree. This is an important feature of the game which we could use to solve the problem.

My suggestion would be extend the techtree with several very expensive techs (maybe Mio of techpoints each level) and making them public for others of course

)
The problem is just to evaluate how many techs you need that you can never run out of them even in a very long 250 system game.

Such handling of the prob would be a lot more fun than this "dry" future level x thing in MOO2.

bye
Klaus

PS: another help would be the suggestion I made below with a tech multiplier, IMO.

Baron Munchausen · #37 February 12th, 2001, 07:52 PM

One option is to make Stellar Manipulations much more expensive. They are hugely powerful, after all. Bump the point cost per level up some.

Another option is possible if MM would provide a way to enable racial technologies for other races. You could then have an area called 'genetic engineering' for a few million points and then a field for each of the racial techs for a few million more. Then it would really be possible to research EVRYTHING.

[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 12 February 2001).]

geoschmo · #38 February 12th, 2001, 09:12 PM

quote:
Another option is possible if MM would provide a way to enable racial technologies for other races. You could then have an area called 'genetic engineering' for a few million points and then a field for each of the racial techs for a few million more. Then it would really be possible to research EVRYTHING.

I like that idea Baron, but you don't really need MM to do this. You could simply add all the components "for Organic tech say" to a different branch on the research tree that does not require the Organic Racial attribute to research.

Then make them extrordinalrily expensive, so as to not imbalance the game. There is nothing about the techs themselves in the code that requires the Organic tech. Only researching them does.

That's why if you capture ships or facilities that have racial tech as a foundation, they still work for you, but you can't repair them or build new ones.

[This message has been edited by geoschmo (edited 12 February 2001).]

ColdSteel · #39 February 12th, 2001, 09:26 PM

The Baron has several good ideas. Has anything relating to the running out of tech issue and what to do about it been discussed within the beta group lately? With Aaron?

raynor · #40 February 12th, 2001, 09:33 PM

Thanks, y'all. Some great ideas.

Hey! Check out the interview with Geoschmo on TwinGalaxies pages.

I'm gonna email them and suggest they interview Baron Munchausen next.