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Original post by Spoonster
Make it take a good while to upgrade all your units? So even if I''ve researched a tactical nuke with dual laser cannons, all my units are still fitted with catapults, and I''ll need to drag them home to base for refitting, which takes time.

Or try to strike a balance between upgrade cost and weapon strength. Tricky, I know, but essentially, you could try to hit a balance where, if you''ve got a big force equipped with mediocre weapons, it''s just not worth upgrading them, unless you''ve got way too much money, or something like that. So your new tech will be used primarily in building new units, but generally, you won''t bother to upgrade the old ones.

You might want to take a look at Master of Orion 3... It''s got it''s share of shortcomings, but it''s actually a pretty decent game. But the point in mentioning it is that in MOO3, you can''t upgrade your ships *at all*. So your fleets usually consist of various semi-obsolete ships, since by the time you''ve managed to build a bunch of your new advanced ships, you''ll have invented something better.

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Life is like a grapefruit. It''s sort of orangy-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It''s got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast

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I like the idea of re-fitting your catapults ...etc. But like you said, to drag a whole army home would be too much of a hassle. How about having an engineer unit, or construction unit. Like whatever you have to make your buildings. Give them the builty to upgrade units in the field. Granted you would have to penalize the unit and the engineer a certain fram of time.(Units can''t attack while being upgraded, naturally) But that would be a nice way of trying to upgrade some units if you were at war. Just a thought..

-DD

Tom, I couldn't download your game, but in general there are some ways to make armrace less likely.

1) Lower the resource to make players fight for resources

2) Employ an Admiral leveling system based on kills, simulating the fact that more experienced admirals have better commands and tactics (Do you actually fight it out like is starcraft, or just numbers? In the case that you fight it out, Admirals may learn ambush abilities, better formations, or allow better pilot AI or autocast of special abilities.)

3) Since you have so many races: make strong technologies available only after you've captured an enemy starbase, flagship, or reserach building, to simulate capturing of alien technologies (so to get really good techs you need to siege or raid)

4) Make technologies effects increase with troops' skill level, so that a fleet with higher tech may still be defeated by a fleet with ace-pilots.

Modula units are really cool, since an experienced player knows what kinds of unit are effective and fit their play styles.

Estok

[edited by - Estok on March 31, 2003 6:30:29 PM]

better weapons should take more money to keep them up in good shapes (upkeep system in Warcraft III). That is, the better you techonology level, higher cost you should pay.

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Current project: 2D in Direct3D engine.
% completed: ~35%
Status: Active.

Lately I''ve been playing a board game called Twilight Imperium. It''s a great game, feels like a board game conversion of MOO. Anyway, technology upgrades are very expensive in TI. You can usually only afford 5-10 over the course of a single game. What''s possibly more important is that most of the upgrades have strict prerequisites. So if you wanted to buy all the weapons upgrades, you''d also need to buy most of the other upgrades in the game as well to meet the precursor technology requirements. What this forces you to do is focus on one or two ''upgrade paths''. For example, you might buy the techs to speed up your carriers, plus an upgrade that improves your fighters attack. Or you might tech up your battleships. The idea being that the prerequisites system plus the high cost of upgrades forces you to choose a technology strategy based on racial abilities, your plan for the game, who your neighbors are, etc.

An arms race is a multi-tier expenditure process: You need scientists and equipment to research and discover the new technology, then you need to invest in new factories and manufacturing processes to produce field-ready versions of the new technology, then you need to transport and/or fit the new technology to vehicles and other installations at point of use. On the other side of the equation, the discovery of a new technology will shorten the interval before opponents discover/develop something similar - or superior - by mere fact of the possibility of observation and analysis, not to mention the effects of having technology actually fall into enemy hands (espionage, capture, accidents).

The time penalties involved in all of these should be countered by the advantage gained by striking early and decisively, effectively making a pure arms race clearly disadvantageous. You have an array of forces at work in this problem, now fashion a design (pattern) to resolve them.

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Original post by alnite
better weapons should take more money to keep them up in good shapes (upkeep system in Warcraft III). That is, the better you techonology level, higher cost you should pay.

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Not necessarily. Very often new technology is cleaner and more efficient than older (fuel cells vs ICEs) or presents significant strategic and tactical advantages (radar, sonar, other detection and anti-detection technologies), which offset the cost of service and maintenance, making total cost of operation effectively lower.

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Original post by Tom
This takes the arms race to another level in which it appears less of an arms race and more of an adventure into the unknown. The research panel would have a list of "probable outcomes," technology that will most likely blossom as a result of that particular avenue. Then there''s the case of prototyping and miniaturization, which adds even more options to the mix.

The biggest problem I foresee it balancing it all.

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This is precisely what I meant. Research should be a discovery into the unknown wherein it''s not certain exactly what you''re going to get. The trick is in deriving new functionality from your technological research.

There is an old paper and pen roleplaying game called Champions which was amazing for its ability to make anything you could dream of. It essentially had "Powers", which in turn could be modified by limitations or advantages, and could be put into certain frameworks. Essentially, the powers were the functionality, and the advantages and limitations put certain stipulations or special effects of that functionality into the power (for example, a power normally drew off the internal "endurance" of the character, however, he could take an advantage that required no endurance cost, or conversely could make his power more tiring for the character). Frameworks were things which allowed for groupings of powers under a certain set of rules. For example, as a mage, you might want to set aside a "pool" of points which could be treated as spells, but all of the spells would have the same advantages of limitations. The game was WAY ahead of its time (it was developed in 1981 IIRC) and it''s still one of the grandaddies of RPG''s and has probably evolved less than any of its peers (AD&D, Traveller) because of its inherent flexibility.

Oluseyi mentioned something which is important too. There''s a research and discovery component, and then there''s the mass-production industrialization component. In the discovery phase, it''s important to have the right people and facilities in order to discover these new technologies. Unfortunately, most games abstract these factors out and only require the player to pay a lump sum of money and require certain pre-requisite buildings before the new technology can be discovered. The trouble here is that once again, you have a pre-determined formula....if I have buildings B, D and G, and I pay 2000 credits, I get cool new device X. It''d be more interesting to have variable rules regarding this, such as having base requirements, but not guaranteeing the new technology at that point. You can increase the probablity of finding something useful by increasing the number of researchers and facilities and channeling more money into their efforts.

The implementation phase is just as important. Usually most games have as their pre-requisite buildings the manufacturing centers for new technology, and not so much the research type buildings (universities and government complexes). So the manufacturing type buildings should be of sufficient technological levels to mass produce these items. As an example, the Greek tinkerer Hero actually developed a steam engine in BC times, but A) he didn''t think about how it could be useful (he used it as entertainment and B) there would be no mass production facilities in Greece or Rome to capitalize on steam engine production. Part A) is something to worry about too. It''s possible your scientists discovered something but didn''t realize its worth. As the example I gave earlier, the English developed the jet engine first, and indeed the Germans looked at the patent design to get ideas for their own engine. But the English thought Jets would be too costly and prohibitive to be used in fighter planes. Another example of wasted technological prowess was the gatling gun. Many Generals at the time considered them a waste of ammunition and therefore did not use them....Custer had a battery of Gatling Guns at his disposal just before Wounded Knee...imagine what might have happened had he realized their usefulness?

A lot of this brings on a lot of added headaches, but if you really hate the concept of arms races you can try to think of ways to deveop Tech Trees which are not predefined, and change the set of rules of going about the road to discivery and implementation of new tech. In my game personally, I''ve didged this entire issue by not having new tech. My game time-span is relatively short, and I''ve included all the functionality that units can use. A cheat perhaps, but I thought devising a tech tree would be pretty diffuclt and I didn''t want to tackle it. I may at a later point, but as of now, I have no plans on how to implement a research portion for my game.

Reminds me of Alpha Centauri. In it, you had the ability to create your own units based on the technology you currently have. But in it, they didn''t have different elements which dealt more damage to one type of technology than the other.

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- Rob Loach
Current Project: Upgrade to .NET and DirectX 9
Percent Complete: X%

Refitting is perfectly reasonable, but some things need to be considered:

How far do you want to allow someone to upgrade something?
Let''s be real, after you upgrade that Model T so far, it''s no longer any more of a Model T than a Corvette is an SUV. It becomes more and more expensive to refit an old piece of equipment the longer you have it also. Engines are built for what you''re currently building, not for what you built 15 or 50 years ago. It will fit what you built 15 years ago much more easily than it will fit what you built 50 years ago and it will fit that piece 50 years ago much more easily than it would fit something you built 100 years ago.

Sure, you can put an 8-inch gun (the gun on most Cruisers in WW-2) on that galleon, but do you really think that the money that you put into reinforcing the Galleon is money well spent? You''d probably spend about the same money building a new Cruiser that won''t sink the first time it gets hit by a few 20mm shells. Eventually only an evil Despot could even convince someone to do it. Going into the technology age, it eventually becomes more and more of a challenge to upgrade, as you don''t just need to upgrade the superstructure to handle the hardware you''re equipping (and to take hits from what you''re facing), you need to start refitting the infrastructure.

My suggestions? Make certain things intrinsic with the superstructure of whatever it is that you''re refitting. The wiring harness might not be too hard to install in a Model T (big open spaces) but pulling the wiring harness of a 2003 Lincoln Towncar in order to replace the computer systems with something newer is going to be a completely different ballgame. The newer systems tie into everything and they''re not really all that modular. With larger objects (ships) they can''t be modular. You can upgrade the systems. Why do we do it? Because it''s cheaper and easier to replace the targeting systems on a 1970 Cruiser for missiles or better hardware than it is to build a completely new one. Is it cheaper to pull out the diesel engine from an old, small carrier and reaplace it with a nuclear one? Possibly, but it doesn''t fall in with our naval doctrine and the smaller one isn''t going to scare many people out there like a Nimitz class will.

The US was rolling destroyers off the line at rediculous rates in WW2, but none of them had the same dimensions. It''s not because they sucked (they did things we can''t figure out how they did now), it''s because when you''re dealing with something that big and with that many parts, if you have a margin of error of .1% per part, it adds up quickly. Every part was actually modified to fit with everything around it. Some ships were several feet longer than others, regardless of the fact that they were built at virtually the same time, with the same plans.

So how do you implement it? Make a function of the item cost versus the chassis ''era''.

Example:

You have a 3rd era ship and you want to put a 6th era weapon system on it. First you take the cost of the weapon. 75 Megacredits. Then you figure the difference between the eras, that would be 3 eras, so multiply the price by 3. Then to figure in the cost of pulling the old piece and replacing it, multiply that cost again by 2. So you started with a 75 Megacredit weapon system, but to upgrade the ship to the minimum level ot handle the system and install the system, it will cost you 450 Megacredits.

Now here''s the kicker, it costs a lot, right? How do you mitigate that? Upgrade several systems at the same time. Charge the ''rip the ship open'' cost only once. So you want to upgrade the targeting system with a 5th era version that costs 30 Megacredits, that will cost you 60 more megacredits to install that (2 era difference between chassis and system). So now you''ve replaced 2 systems and you''re paying quite a bit, but you''ve got a 3rd era ship that hits like a 5th or 6th era ship. All of a sudden you''ve got a slow eggshell that hits with a hammer. Do you do this with your ships that get in there and punch it out? No, you do it with support ships. Who cares if your missile Cruisers can only take 1 hit versus your mainline cruisers taking 4 hits when your missile cruisers are 5 times as far away and most enemies probably won''t ever get close enough to hit them? If you never get shot at you never get hit.

There are other things to consider, such as maintenance costs. How much will it cost you to maintain an era 4 frigate sized ship in era 10? Probably about the same as it will cost to maintain an era 10 cruiser. Is it really worth it to maintain that era 4 ship? At what point will you have paid more in maintenance than you would for that new cruiser? Maintenance costs usually have very little to do with food and water for the men as they do with the cost of finding (or more commonly getting one custom built) a Fragablatz Unerator when you''ve been running Yurnithig Unerators for the last 8 years. Or even worse, 15 years later when there are only 15 people in your navy who even know how to operate a Unerator at all and there hasn''t been a factory to make ANY kind of Unerator in 10 years. Of course you could refit to get rid of the Unerator, but that thing was huge, it was almost part of the ship''s superstructure through that section... when you get that Canilenator in there you''re gonna have over 100,000 cubic feet of empty space. You could use it for more men, but you now only need 2 men to run the Canilenator and you needed 5 to keep the Unerator running, so you don''t need as many men. You can''t install weapons systems there because it''s in the worst place for a weapon system.

To keep from going on forever, there are a lot of reasons why people upgrade systems and a lot of better reasons why they replace with new. You have to give them as many of each reason as you can. Let them bulid chassis by era and then stick whatever they want in it. If they are thinking forward, they''ll build era 5 chassis for their era 4 ships, if they just want it quick and dirty, they''ll use an era 3 chassis for those era 4 systems.

BTW, if you didn''t figure it out, it costs the same to mount era 3, 4 or 5 systems on an era 4 chassis and it costs the same to mount an era 4 system on an era 3, 4, or 5 chassis. This is so that people can mix and match some, but ideally they keep their technology going forward more balanced. You can arm your eggshells with hammers, but I''d much rather have my hammers in the hands of a heavily armored knight.

Oh yeah, to address the whole ''arms race'' thing.

Here''s some more things to consider.

What technologies are ''atrocity'' technologies? Here on Earth Nuclear, Biological and Chemical weapons are on that list and if anyone uses them they''re probably up Shit Creek.

Planet destroyers, Neutron bombs (those magical weapons that kill the people but leave the infrastructure intact) and anything else that basically trashes huge amounts of populace would probably be on that list in a space game.

Now, how do we show off the ''Shit Creek'' aspect?

Well, first you have to look at what you''re up against. Anywhere from 4-12 interstellar races. Must be bloodthirsty warmongers, right? Duh. They got that far because they cooperated, not because they ''killed everyone that wasn''t my color on the map''. You had better be the first to get that Death Star because if you''re not, you''re probably gonna get a Death Star sitting over your capital telling you that you''d better get your affairs in order and stop playing with Death Star technology. If someone else gets that technology first, then there will be 3 different types of races left.

A) The ''me too'' races. They join with the big guy because they don''t want to get the snot kicked out of themselves. They usually secretly are trying to get Death Star technology.

B) The ''screw you'' races. They will go against the Death Star owners just because they happen to have a Death Star. This is usually because they''re jealous (and are researching the technology themselves) or because they''re French.

C) The ''just don''t use it'' races. They will usually be somewhere in between. They are upset that you built the Death Star, but so long as you just walk softly and carry the Death Star and don''t actually swing it, you''re fine. The first thing that they''ll do if you swing it is pull everyone else together to kick the living snot out of you.

There is only one thing that is common among all 3 of these. You use it and ALL of them will jump on the bandwagon to kick the living snot out of you for using it. If you''re at war when you develop it, they''ll probably forgive a couple of uses, just so long as you just use it until your enemy surrenders. You keep trashing his planets though and they''ll all jump you.

Some other things to think about. Nobody who has 12-20 Billion sentients depending on them is going to say "I might go down, but I''m taking you with me". They will negotiate peace conditions to save their people long before it gets that far. If they don''t, they won''t be the leader for very long. If you keep attacking after they say ''Uncle'', you''re an evil, warmongering race and are probably going to get mashed by everyone else soon, just to save the galaxy from your evil.

Here''s the moral of what I have to say: Most strategy games are horribly unrealistic. While it''s very cliche (and relatively unrealistic) to say that no homocidal races will become space-worthy, it is reasonable to say that any race that is fatalistic more than they are cooperational will never make it that far.

There are the racial excuses... "but we''re a different race", but those don''t work because there are other races everywhere, even within a race. We have oriental, african, indonesian, indian, mediterranean, hispanic and many more. Heck, we even have people fighting over Serbian and Croatian and nobody outside of that area could tell the difference between two if they were standing next to each-other. The basic reality is that if you don''t cooperate enough to basically get past those issues, you''ll never get far enough to even think of space travel. Xenophobia doesn''t start when you hit space, it starts when you cross that dirt path. If a race can get past that, they will eventually get past the fact that humans don''t even have the same cellular structure as anything on their planet and I''m sure that we will get past the fact that they don''t even have DNA that we can recognize as such initially and no matter what, when it comes down to surviving and cooperating with those slime-coated lizard looking people one star cluster over, I''m sure we''ll cooperate with the lizards and so would anyone else.

The only thing you can upgrade in Stars! is your space station. In the case of obsolete units, you must send them back to a space station to be scrapped, gradually reducing the fleet until all instances of that unit are out of service. (Technically, you could delete the design plans from your ship design database while there are still ships in service, but doing so would unrealistically destroy all instances of that ship, so nobody ever did.)

Conversely, in Alpha Centauri you can upgrade everything, provided it can reach a base. You then pay the upgrade cost and everything is kosher. Upgrading was generally a gradual process -- you would rarely jump more than two or three steps of technology at a time -- but I've upgraded units that I had sitting around for hundreds of years, and I don't believe the cost is cumulative.

I've got a different system that ought to work. First, let's hardwire engines into the chassis, such that if you want a new engine, you'll have to build a new chassis. I think this accurately simulates the technical impossibility of interfacing new technology with an obsolete chassis. Second, let's take the MechCommander route and say, components are produced on an individual basis. (I put that in bold because I think it's a fantastic idea that has never been used in any strategy game that I know of.) They are kept in warehouses until you want to attach them to something. This also allows you to remove existing components and put them in storage for later use (or scrap them if you can't afford the space).

The first and most obvious result of this system is that each player will probably have fewer units, partly because they're more expensive to make, partly because it takes longer to make them, partly because he'll get tired of reconfiguring his units everytime he discovers something new. (Alternately, he may decide to "macro" the building process and make more of a relatively weak design in hopes of defeating his opponent with sheer numbers.)

The second result is that each unit is highly customizeable. I think this is important because it implies a greater sense of ownership in what the player is creating -- his empire is literally custom-tailored to his taste. I don't want to imagine the amount of play-testing required to balance such a system, but I do like to imagine the number of strategic possibilities in a system like this. I think it's a good tradeoff.

Now, as for technology. . . I think Dauntless is on the right track. After listening to myself, I think I'm putting way too much weight on this whole research thing. I enjoy being able to acquire more useful components as time passes, and indeed one strategy (the arms race, of course) is to focus on developing these components. Perhaps I was being too hasty to push aside the arms race philosophy. It would be best to design a game that caters to and (this is important) rewards all styles of play so that people are willing to try new things.

So now I want to develop a simpler research system. Rather than use fields of technology (energy, propulsion, etc.), let's use elements of the game itself: chasses, engines, weapons, defenses, buildings, mass transit, resource collection and storage. . . the player is left to decide what's most important to the success of his empire.

Now I want to direct some replies at specific people.

Estok: All good ideas, and I will consider them all. I am planning to have a light advancement system for personnel, implementing a system in which they can adopt new fields of expertise after they've served in your forces long enough. (This is akin to taking a new MOS after four or five years in the U.S. military.)

snak_attack: I suggested a similar approach in my last post, in which the ability to research other fields would diminish as you researched any field. It's not a bad idea; it forces the player to decide fairly early which fields he wants to employ, stream-lining his empire and forcing him to come up with clever strategies when he faces an enemy he isn't prepared to handle.

Oluseyi: Very good point. New technology is generally discovered by one or two people, and its application employed by one or two groups, but widespread use is only possible after an infrastructure has been established to support it. (Portable technology like medicine doesn't suffer from this problem, but consider how useful our lamps and televisions and PC's would be if nobody had thought to route powerlines to our homes.)

Rob Loach: You brought up an interesting point. Blizzard implemented a damage-vs-armor system in StarCraft , but many strategy games don't even mess with this. I basically have three types of attacks in my game (which are subjective and suited to the game itself): ballistic, electric, and fire. There are complementary materials to defend against these attacks. Which you use depends on (a) what you're up against, (b) how much it costs, and (c) the advantages and drawbacks of using it -- probably in that order.

solinear: Very good input. As you can see above, I've decided to use your ideas.

Thanks a lot for the input everyone.

[edited by - Tom on April 4, 2003 12:45:17 PM]