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Original post by c-Row Adapting to an enemy's technology doesn't have to mean to be able to only recreate his weapons and equipment. Well, try to capture it! If you engage them in a space fight, let one of their ships survive and then invade it. Usually, a player would just blow up the enemy vessel, since most of the time there is no point in sending expensive invading troops just to add that one more ship to your fleet. With a reward like this, a player would think twice about destroying such a great source of new technology.

Nice idea. I'm also working on a 4X type game , so am quite merrily scouring this forum looking for good ideas to rip off ( err , allow myself to be influenced by ). I remember playing a strategy game where you could only research certain things once you'd seen one of your opponents using it , and then you could slash the research time quite dramatically if you could get your hands on a working model.

How about at least one of your ships has to survive the battle , in order to send to you their sensor readings ( or whatever ) of your opponents new toy?

Each race would choose a certain research path at the beginning , and the only way you could build things from a different path would be by capturing or trading for them ( want a level 2 energy shield? Capture a ship with one , and send it to your labs for examination - or trade , or send spies to steal). But that will only let you build what ever it is you've captured ( or gone up against in battle ). Of course , the more technology from a certain path you've managed to assimilate , the greater chance of your scientists being able to research stuff from it by themselves , without needing to be 'inpsired' by their opponents stuff first.

If you see what I mean

Sorry , for some reason , my post went through about 6 times

[Edited by - SadisticToaster on September 16, 2005 1:53:17 PM]

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[Edited by - SadisticToaster on September 16, 2005 1:53:40 PM]

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[Edited by - SadisticToaster on September 16, 2005 1:54:17 PM]

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[Edited by - SadisticToaster on September 16, 2005 1:54:34 PM]

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Original post by SadisticToaster Nice idea. I'm also working on a 4X type game , so am quite merrily scouring this forum looking for good ideas to rip off ( err , allow myself to be influenced by ).

:D

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I remember playing a strategy game where you could only research certain things once you'd seen one of your opponents using it , and then you could slash the research time quite dramatically if you could get your hands on a working model.

Sounds like X-Com to me. Indeed, UFO Defense had a quite similar approach on the tech tree side. Humans had a number of own technology to research and manufacture, but once you had captured your first alien equipment, a whole new bunch of research possibilities unfolded. Things were still a bit static, though, since you always encountered the same aliens and their weapons/technology.

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How about at least one of your ships has to survive the battle , in order to send to you their sensor readings ( or whatever ) of your opponents new toy?

Makes sense, and would still reward the player for cowarding... eh, I eman, tactical retreat.

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Of course , the more technology from a certain path you've managed to assimilate , the greater chance of your scientists being able to research stuff from it by themselves , without needing to be 'inpsired' by their opponents stuff first.

Hm, didn't think of that, yes. Like as soon as you fully understood an unknown technology, you could use it yourself without just copying an enemy's tech.

Of course, from a game design side of things you would need to come up with hundreds of different techs and equipment... (although some technology might just not be compatible with another)


So many ideas, so little time (and programming experience)

I think that SadisticToaster's suggestion would be even easier to code like this: (you know, describing this stuff is really cool and easy, but sometimes the technical side is much much harder to pin down)

You simply have another bar for each technology you can research: "knowledge".
This is a measurement of what your scientists have to work on that technology, and it represents directly the speed at which they can research that technology. At first it is zero, so you actually cannot research it at all.

When you successfully research a technology, it will boost the knowledge of others that are related. This will create a technology tree or web that will provide a lot of interesting choices and objectives to pursuit (you can't get your hands on your enemy's Positron Scrambler Beam, so you research other positron-based technologies in order to raise your chances of researching it).

The coolest thing would be that, as you had more encounters with a technology, your chances to research it would slowly improve, and have a big boost if you had a working piece of it, or just some scraps or stolen information.
Gameplay would be improved in that, if you really want a technology, you can actively make its research take less time by doing these side-missions! :P

I think That Space Empire 4 had 1 nice concept

It had various research trees. 1 main with common tecnologies to all races. And other smaller trees for special tecnologies that you could buy with race points (before starting the game, like moo2). The tech trees were about "psychic powers", "organic manipulation" and so on.

I think thats a good way to go.

Each race could have 1 or more unique tech trees besides the main (common) tree, and you could custom your race using race points to get the extra tree. You could even put tech nodes that required techs from 2 or mor trees (like a psyonic machine, or an organic quantum-based computer. Imagination is the limit).

The bad side is that it was divided by areas to be researched in a sucessive way (like moo2) but in SE4 it had too much areas to coose (even in beggining) and a reseach could generate too much branchs. So it was a pain to choose what to research. The brilliant side was that you could research various techs at the same time.

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In reality (as we can see in history) the civilization tend to create an unique culture while isolated, and evolve in a peculiar way. But with contact with other civilizations, they tend to trade tecnology (by trade or war) and in the end we get 2 very similar cultures. The weapons get similar, the tools, etc...

I think in a galactic race it should be similary true. Of course, humans cannot mutate his body to a ship, but when with contact with an all organic race using organic ships we will want to research ways to make organic ships. If well using or not (or well use some hybrid tecnology) will depends if our technology is superior enough to take out their organic ships. The same goes to the organic race. If they DO research, they GONNA research metal/silicon use.

The tech tree should achieve that. The races should start with diferent techs, and later in game (by trade, spy, war,...) become equal techs.

That means that humans could not start with psionics research tree, but then assimilated the tech, they could reseach further without help.

As for an open ended game, I think it is great, but it must be an ending objective (kill everyone or make an united federation). You could put an tech tree, and then it ends it goes for the numbers... "propulsor #13" for instance should give "engine #13" and "fuel #13". Well, it dont sounds fun, but its much better that dont having anything to research anymore.