I’m writing a Design Doc for my TBS, and I need some feedback on my technology system Below is the overview of the technology system Each turn in game time is either 5 ,10 ,or 15 years depending on the players’ choice and every 15 years of game time the player receives 1 “Cultural advancement point”. Cultural advancement points are points that you can spread throughout 6 different categories. Agriculture, Social, Warfare, Medical, and engineering. The number of points you dedicate to each cultural advancement category gives you more choices in the technologies in that field are allowed to you. For example someone has years game time and put all 4 of his points on agriculture therefore he would have a fairly wide range of agricultural technologies and a very limited range on other things. Cultural advancement categories are really just the things your civilization is proficient at. The higher the cultural advancement category the more technologies you may research. Is my system to complicated? Is it well balanced? I’m probably making it seem more complicated then it is.

You should have a look at Civilization saga. How every civilization advances may give you an idea about how to balance it.
What I cannot understand is what advantage is to use 5 or 10 years instead of 15. Maybe yo can do less actions when choosing 15 but a faster advance in technology?

You should have a look at Civilization saga. How every civilization advances may give you an idea about how to balance it.
What I cannot understand is what advantage is to use 5 or 10 years instead of 15. Maybe yo can do less actions when choosing 15 but a faster advance in technology?

Imo, no one can answer those questions for nontrivial designs
To me, this system is not really complicated, but im influenced by Civ, Master of Orion and similar games. (btw, take a look at master of orion I's approaches to technology: removing random technologies based on skill in a certain field instead of a static techtree.)

So, in doubt, you should implement it and look what happens.

Greetings

The advantage to 5 , 10 , or 15 is that depending on the different things in the civilization if you move to quickly lets say 15 years a turn then your people's morale will go down and your resources will get depleted faster.

The technology system in my game all leads up to the current timeline in the game. The game begins in stoneage and advances to futuristic times. To change the timeline you have to have a certain amount of tchnologies researched. Each technology you research is worth a certain amount of timeline points , which are not displayed to the player and once you get enough timeline points you advance to the next timeline. For example the wheel is a very early technology in the game that shows up upnder the engineering category since it is pivotal in the development of society it is worth sevveral timeline points. Fire is also worth very many points, It would be almost impossible to advance a civilization without the research of fire and the wheel

Okay, its abstraction and all, but is there anyone else besides me, who think that Civ research system is...odd, from the logical pov ?

- "Oi, you there smarty monks, the enemy besieged us, invent something to defeat them !"
- "Yes, sire, we can invent iron to cut them with swords, or we can invent wheel to trample them with chariots."
- "Right then, invent the wheel, and be fast about it !"
- "Sorry my liege, it will take 300 years. Maybe if you had another library built..."

Am i alone in thinking there is something wrong with this picture ?
Just the goal alone - "lets invent the wheel" - is somewhat...

Yep, its completely wrong and its not even fun.

Quote:

Original post by Karnot Okay, its abstraction and all, but is there anyone else besides me, who think that Civ research system is...odd, from the logical pov ? - "Oi, you there smarty monks, the enemy besieged us, invent something to defeat them !" - "Yes, sire, we can invent iron to cut them with swords, or we can invent wheel to trample them with chariots." - "Right then, invent the wheel, and be fast about it !" - "Sorry my liege, it will take 300 years. Maybe if you had another library built..." Am i alone in thinking there is something wrong with this picture ? Just the goal alone - "lets invent the wheel" - is somewhat...

Yes it is ridiculous, I was thinking about this the other day coincidentally! I remember in one game, Theme Park World I think, that you set sort of general goals to research. For example, in Civ, it could be 5 categories: Military, Economy, Health etc. The user can then define the total amount they want to invest in research and then divide it between the categories. This can work really well as it is much more realistic and allows you to set priorities. However, players will come to memorize the way things are researched.

One possible solution to this is have it so it is random, and maybe even mutually exclusive. For example, if you randomly find out about oil before coal, then you never find out about coal. This would keep players on there feet and, instead of building the techs to meet their strategy, they would have to build there strategy to meet their techs.

One, slightly more off the wall idea I had, that requires loads of work, is that at random intervals, new techs are added, via the internet, and old techs taken off. This could then work in rotation, but keeping the random interval and with no specific order. This would work better in games set in the future as the technology is made up anyway. Once again, the player would never know what to expect, like in real life. Finally, the player would get the experience of discovering something new because they won't have read about it in the instruction manual and they won't immediately know what it allows them to do.

Take a look at the structure of Scientific Revolutions and paradigms if you want to take a new look at how technological advancement actually works.

Progression could work as a continuous system instead of the Civilization-esque discrete research fields now, with R&D being normally distributed. A simple integral going from negative infinity to some variable C depending on certain research conditions, reaching a tipping point at the mean which represents the largest rate at which the scientific community accepts an idea, therefore slowing down as there are fewer members of academia who don't believe in a given idea.

An interesting twist to this is that it presents the player with an additional challenge. The player researched a field of some theoretical science, but the applied science come afterwards when the engineers tinker with it. If the player devotes research to some farfetched theory and it becomes accepted practice, it may yield poor results from the engineers. It presents the player with multiple options for varying degrees of engineering success.