Mxzs said:
That might not stop other people, but if it is your Erector set, I'd be very shy about telling you to screw it together in a different way.
Ah, screw it.
One of the many terrific ideas you have is that the possession of some techs should give a boost to the research of other, related techs. The idea is intuitive, easy to grasp, seems realistic, is highly useful, etc. But to realize it in game terms you have to describe some rather complex notions like "soft" and "hard prereqs" and of percent bonuses that would be applied to the tech that is currently under research or which could be applied to some "soft" prerequisite tech in case there is a-- And now I've got a headache again.
It's complicated because you're still working with the old and (you're right to call it this)
obsolete tech structure in Civ. True, it's still around because it's elegant and easy to play with, but if you want a different research model, I think you ought to work
deeper into the very idea of technological evolution and not just staple a lot of complications onto the skeleton Sid Meier created fifteen years ago.
I'm not saying I've got the last word on this (I doubt I've even come up with the idea first), but here's a notion I've been toying with:
In Civ a tech is basically a node in a network (albeit, a network stretched out along a single axis) that also carries a license to build stuff. So, Fishing powers up a channel leading to Pottery while also giving you a license to build work boats. Because it has no other structural features, ideas like yours can only be implemented by adding a lot of extraneous connections and relations (like bonuses), and this kind of stuff can be hard to keep track of. It's also inelegant.
Now, it's not really possible to construct an alternate and elegant way of modeling techs and their relations that perfectly captures what you have proposed: after all, your proposal is crafted with the current system at its base. Still, I think there is at least one alternate structure that could capture behavior very much like what you describe, and in a simpler way.
Basically, techs could be modeled not as nodes in a network but as integral components of larger structures. Just as a car is made up of simpler parts that blend together into a larger whole, later techs could be modeled as
composites of earlier techs. These later techs would be discovered
as soon as all of their components (the earlier prerequisite techs) had been discovered. So, for example (I'm making up examples on the fly): Cannon and Steam Power would not be techs whose discovery would allow you to
research Ironclads. Rather, each would be (in addition to whatever other benefits it conferred) 1/2 of the Ironclads tech. Once the second of these precursor techs (whichever it happened to be) were discovered, the Ironclad tech would "pop."
By itself, of course, this doesn't seem like a big change; in the example above it would only mean that you wouldn't have to pursue the extra step of researching or acquiring the independent Ironclad tech. But when techs are elements in more than one combine, the savings accumulate. So suppose that Steam Power were also an element (along with Corporation) in Railroad. Then instead of having to research five techs to get both Ironclads and Railroad (Cannon, Steam Power, Corporation, Ironclads, and Railroad) you would only need to secure three (Cannon, Steam Power, Corporation): Ironclads would appear when you had two (Cannon and Steam Power), and Railroads would appear when you added Corporation. The more overlap there is between techs, the tighter these shortcuts are. The effect is not
built like a bonus, but it would have a similar effect: By researching a cluster of closely related techs, you would draw closer more quickly to a series of more advanced techs. If the basic techs accumulated in the right order, you might find a situation in which two or three or even more later techs "popped" on the same turn.
To offset the quickened pace, though, techs would probably have to be composed of more than two prerequisites. (But the new structure—which takes techs as
sets, not
nodes—would make it easier to implement techs with more than two immediate prerequisites; the need to describe tech advances in a
tree seems to be one reason that techs right now have a maximum of two prerequisites.) So instead of having two, Ironclads might actually require as many as five components (oh, let's say: Cannon, Steam Power, Propeller, Iron-Rolling, Advanced Shipbuilding). This would probably manage to do two things: first, it would slow down the pace of advance, but it would also make it easier to create the kind of clusters that could lead to "bonus-like" behavior.
For example, imagine three composite techs: Ironclads (Steam Power, Iron Rolling, Propeller, Cannon Making, Advanced Shipbuilding); Railroad (Steam Power, Iron Rolling, Corporation); and Armored Artillery (Steam Power, Iron Rolling, Cannon Making, Modern Explosives). To acquire the three later techs you would have to research seven precursors. (If classic Civ had these prerequisites, you'd have to research ten.) But once you were researching within this closely interrelated cluster (all three require Steam Power and Iron Rolling; two require Cannon Making) the three could pop in close succession. In fact, if either Steam Power or Iron Rolling were the last to be researched, all three would pop on the same turn. Again, it doesn't work in the same way that "bonuses" provided by techs in a tree would work, but it would lead to a very similar effect.
This new structure would also provide an easy way of characterizing and capturing the difference between "being adopted" and "being embraced." An "adopted" tech is one that has been discovered, which can be used, but might be lost because it is only weakly woven into the fabric of the civilization; an "embraced" tech is one that is a component of at least one other discovered tech. That's because technologies are permanently acquired when they are
transcended, which happens either when they have been made completely obsolete by later techs or when they have been incorporated into them. In the first case, the later tech simply replaces the earlier one, as Modern Explosives (based on modern chemistry) replaces Gunpowder (based on primitive chemistry); Gunpowder doesn't become a permanent tech so much as it becomes useless one. In the second case, any civilization that knows how to operate a tech would know how to operate any of its components; any civilization that knew how to build Ironclads would necessarily also know how to build cannon and steam engines and how to roll iron plating.
The more discovered techs an earlier tech is a component of, the more securely it is embedded: steam power would be solidly possessed by any civilization that possessed (in the above example) Ironclads, Railroads, and Armored Artillery. In fact, you wouldn't even
need to separately develop and model the concept of being "embraced" because that concept would already be realized as a necessary structural feature of the overall tech model.
This structure would also have room for eccentricity—the kind of thing Wodan was talking about. Up above, I mentioned "Armored Artillery." What's that? For lack of a better phrase, it's steam-driven tanks. Now, because later techs are composites of earlier techs, there could be (in mathematical theory) as many possible improvements/buildings/wonders/units as there are combinations of techs—Armored Artillery might be one of them. Now, it would be pointless and impossible to create a unit, etc., for every such possible combination of techs; you'd have to create [(2 to the nth power) minus 1] units, where n is the number of techs in the game. (Imagine 2 to the 80th power units in the game!) But you could provide units, etc., for some of these combinations, as I've playfully provided Armored Artillery. Here would be a natural place for mods to exploit.
(In fact, mods or designers could provide a huge number of units or improvements while also putting an easy limit on their appearance. It structures advanced techs as sets of earlier techs, but it could also structure some of them as
ordered sets of earlier techs, which would sharply limit the chances of some of these advanced techs appearing. For instance, it might structure "Armored Artillery" as the ordered set <Modern Explosives, Cannon Making, Steam Power, Iron Rolling>. Only if you discovered these techs in this precise order would "Armored Artillery" appear. By making the "vanilla" techs unordered sets but alternate-world techs ordered sets, the designers could actually hide whole alternate tech lines inside the game.)
Some of your other ideas, I think, could also be more intuitively realized within this kind of framework. For instance, once techs are conceived as sets (ordered or otherwise), it is easy enough to make non-techs into elements of such sets. For instance, the set for Ironclads could be (Steam Power, Iron Rolling, Propeller, Cannon Making, [Tool Works]), where "[Tool Works]" is a city building (a proto-factory). Before the Ironclad tech can be realized, at least one Tool Works would have to be built, and the tech would remain active only so long as one such building were in operation. If during a war the all such buildings were destroyed, the civ would lose the ability to build Ironclads. Of course, the conceptual elements of the tech would probably not disappear, and the civ could quickly get Ironclads back if it built another Tool Works. But if the civ suffered serious reverses of a sustained nature, that ability might vanish for a very long time. If enough such reverses occurred, the civ might even enter a dark age, possibly an irreversible one. (I have read that Iran never fully recovered from Timurlane's destruction of its irrigation works. If Farms were an integral part of some very early techs, imagine the collapse that could follow if you lost all your Farms!) However, it would be a dark age whose causes would be transparent to the player and an outcome of gameplay, and therefore unlikely to be a source of frustration. (Well, it would be the kind of frustration you feel when a war is going badly.)
I've got other ideas. But I'll wait and see the reaction to this one.
) I'll post a series of pictures to discuss, and I'll simply call them 1, 2, 3, etc., based on the order of appearence, of course.
you nailed it. Exactly what I'm going for. I've just been putting more discovery points in Philosophy/Practical while you've been putting them in Philosophy/Theoretical. 
