Unrealistic tech tree with units and techs

Louis XXIV said:

Anyway, I've tried to make a good tech tree - one that is aesthetically pleasing, logical from a gameplay perspective, and logical from a historical perspective. But it is far, far harder than it looks.

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I'm with you on this. I also tried to make an alternative skill tree because there were some aspects of the current one I was displeased with. It was not easy. Sure, I was under the limitation that I wanted to use the skills that was already given and then had to make a better arrangement, whereas they had the freedom of starting from scratch, but on the bottom line, I think there will always be some places where you have to cut a heel to make things fit.

I still have that alternative tree lying around, I never got to try it in game, don't know if it would actually play out better than the current one. My main objection to this one was gameplay aspects rather than realism, though.

mintcandy said:

I disagree, especially with vanilla when Iron units were stronger and more prevalent.

It's more accurate to say that there's a threshold for resource effectiveness, which is directly related to how many effective units depend on the resource in question.

For example, there isn't a real difference in vanilla between a civilization that has no coal and a civilization that has 10 coal, because there's only one unit that actually requires coal, and it isn't particularly effective.

There isn't much of a difference between a civilization that has 30 Iron and a nation that has 50 Iron, because there isn't much that an army with 50 Iron units could do that an army with 30 Iron units couldn't do.

There's a HUGE difference between a civilization that has no aluminum and a civilization that has 20 aluminum. Heck, there's a huge difference between a civilization that has 5 aluminum and one that has 10 aluminum.

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I'd like to see more units use resources, but maybe have more that use multiple resources. So Destroyers and Battleships would still use oil, but maybe a destroyer uses 1 and a Battleship 2.

And early game too. So maybe a swordsman uses 1 iron, but a longsword uses 2. If you also make it more likely to find smaller clumps of resources, so that everyone can have, say, 2-10, it suddenly makes choices feel a lot more important. As opposed to "do I have iron to build a longsword", it might be more "do I want to spend 3 iron on a cannon, or do I spend 2 on the longsword and the other one on something else?"

Yeah, maybe resources should scale. In reality, it doesn't seem like a realistic(yes we can withhold realism for a while but this is ridiculous) that a carrier is as easy to build as it is, it has no resource cost, and it can only hold 3 aircraft. History and reality teaches at that a carrier is literally the most important/expensive to build/scarce/capable navy vessel in the world. There are only like 20 of them!

Yeah, maybe resources should scale. In reality, it doesn't seem like a realistic(yes we can withhold realism for a while but this is ridiculous) that a carrier is as easy to build as it is, it has no resource cost, and it can only hold 3 aircraft. History and reality teaches at that a carrier is literally the most important/expensive to build/scarce/capable navy vessel in the world. There are only like 20 of them!


Actually drac313, there was a whole lot more then 20 - during WWII the United States commissioned over 150 aircraft carriers (CV and CVE) - CVE's on converted Merchant and Oiler hulls. Then you had the IJN with 35 carriers and Royal Navy with 40 even Germany had 1 carrier - so for WWII you are looking at 225 carriers floating around.

And remember that the aircraft represent a whole wing of aircraft, just as individual melee units represent, e.g., a division of tanks.

I think right out of the gate you have to totally ignore the last couple tech tiers. I mean, forget ordering, if they're to believed then in the real world we're right on the verge of sending a colony ship to another star system. The function of the last part of the tech tree is strictly about victory conditions in the game.
It doesn't seem unreasonable for infantry to be stronger than paratroopers or marines, not because they're more advanced but because paratroopers and marines are more lightly equipped because they're somewhat focused on mobility.

I agree that strategics are pretty boring as implemented now. Struggle over resources has been a huge driver for conflict and it would be an interesting addition to civ. The problem I see is that civ isn't even close to making it work. I think the main fundamental problem is that in civ the whole world is usually completely locked down territory-wise by the renaissance. Strategics are too concentrated onto a few tiles. There's no model for supply logistics. There's no mechanism to take temporary control of a resource. You'd need all those to make fighting over resources viable. Even with all that I think it still wouldn't work without adding a stockpiling/consumption mechanic to resources and maybe even depletion and prospecting. Also the diplomacy system would need to be more complex to allow for skirmish/coldwar type fighting without starting a game-long world war. Ultimately and unfortunately, I think that's better left to a more nerdy class of strategy games than civ.

I'd really love to see them switch to doing a bit of forecasting into the future on the tech tree. In the realism department the idea that a civilization is about to "win" seems absurd. I think if they pushed those victory type techs into the future by just a couple tiers they could make the information era a lot more interesting and realistic.

TyBoy said:

I think right out of the gate you have to totally ignore the last couple tech tiers. I mean, forget ordering, if they're to believed then in the real world we're right on the verge of sending a colony ship to another star system.

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I've thought about this. How advanced might we be had there been no "dark ages"? What if scientific advancement hadn't been stifled for centuries by a bully pulpit? Could we have landed on the moon in the mid 18th century?

In any event, the core concepts to put a manned craft in another solar system are "on the table", but have many as-yet unsolved problems.

Spacetime conveyance, or "exploitation of the same principle on which galaxies traverse" is an important step. Things in the universe already have a perpetual velocity. Learning to manipulate this "motion" (more like riding a surf board, and a lesser amount of "paddling") will be a very fuel-efficient travel mode, not to mention rapid, with multiple "slingshots" via force hubs like gravity wells....

... then we just need to develop QFT, or more precisely, field "mechanics theory" and provide an environment of "inertia dampening" so the beings (and other objects) in the craft aren't spaghettified against the back or front grill during periods of extreme acceleration and deceleration...

... the hardest part will be psychologically conditioning the travelers so they don't kill each other during the flight. Actually, this might be too tough. Forget I said anything.

In CivIV you could put a cannon on a Caravel before you could put a cannon on wheels on the ground.

I like to think that as long as you've got some techs around the same tier, your people already have some rudimentary knowledge of 'missing' techs. So, you can finish Construction before Pottery, but that doesn't necessarily mean your people can't make clay pots. It's just that you don't yet have the advanced techniques of the tech in question.

So, Flight without Combustion? Sure. You do know the basics of combustion, just not the nuances that allow Landships and Destroyers - maybe a higher efficiency, for example.

I guess it comes down to suspension of disbelief. The whole tech tree system barely makes any sense at all. I mean you pick what you're researching before you even discover it. And there's only one way to get to something - you must have tech X and Y to get to Z. And you only research one thing at a time. None of which mirrors reality.

But like I was saying... suspension of disbelief. /shrug

TyBoy said:

I agree that strategics are pretty boring as implemented now. Struggle over resources has been a huge driver for conflict and it would be an interesting addition to civ. The problem I see is that civ isn't even close to making it work. I think the main fundamental problem is that in civ the whole world is usually completely locked down territory-wise by the renaissance. Strategics are too concentrated onto a few tiles. There's no model for supply logistics. There's no mechanism to take temporary control of a resource. You'd need all those to make fighting over resources viable.

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I agree with this. There is sort of a supply feature in that you can pillage an enemy mine to cut them off from resources, but there is an inherent problem in the fact that resources are counted only by map amounts and not like gold something you earn and consume. This prevents you from a more advanced ressource supply system where for instance you could station a unit on a resource tile to gain the resources produced from the mine while the unit is occupying it*. I definitely feel that a earn-and-consume mechanism for resources instead of the current fixed-supply would do much good for the strategic elements of the game, because it would add the element of deciding whether to use now or save up for later which is not really there with the current resource system.

* Here I take a clue from the recent Heroes 6 (which is in any way an abomination to an otherwise great game series (also forgetting Heroes 4)) - namely that in this game, if you place a hero on an enemy resource (mine) you temporarily cuts him off from this resource and gets the mine yield to your own kingdom.

Adjuvant said:

I've thought about this. How advanced might we be had there been no "dark ages"? What if scientific advancement hadn't been stifled for centuries by a bully pulpit? Could we have landed on the moon in the mid 18th century?

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Lack of a dark age is why we tend to reach the information era in-game in the 1700's or 1800's in a good game (i.e. one where our civ doesn't go through some kind of dark age ). Whether or not there's a dark age isn't important to the short time gap in-game between the techs that more or less represent "now" and techs that are likely a very long way in the future.

Maintaining a velocity in space isn't really an issue, it's achieving it in the first place that is overwhelming. There are some really interesting things that could/can be done with minimal energy moving long distances between Lagrange points and along gravitational potential lines, but they're all absurdly slow. Surfing works great if you're already offshore and your goal is to get to the beach. That's getting off on quite a tangent though.


As I was typing this I thought of the real thing strategics need in order to replicate real world situations: Economic value. So add that to the previous list of things that would need to be added to make resource based conflict viable. To me it all just adds up to a way nerdier game than civ, at least unmodded civ.

I'm given to understand that the Dark Ages weren't exactly called Dark Ages because it was Medieval Mad Max, its just that we never knew much about them due to lack of records

Also I've seen arguments that Song China could have Industrialized in the 1200s... if it wasn't for the Mongols and lack of real impetus.

I have to disagree with the argument that strategics are boringly implemented. Last night, as Rome, I found that the last city of the Spanish, basically enveloped by my cities, had 14 oil around it, the largest source on the continent. The Inca, the other industrial power on the same continent, launched an attack at the Spanish to get the oil. I, Rome, realized just why they were attacking the Spanish just in time to take the city myself and secure both my own prospects and block a rival.

So I think that the AI now understands how to get and how important strategics are. This is especially true of the Inca, as their start bias, if they start in a large expanse of hills, basically prevents their acquisition of any strategics except horses, coal, and uranium - unless they expand.

However, this type of thing needs to be given to other civs as well.

ork75 said:

I have to disagree with the argument that strategics are boringly implemented. Last night, as Rome, I found that the last city of the Spanish, basically enveloped by my cities, had 14 oil around it, the largest source on the continent. The Inca, the other industrial power on the same continent, launched an attack at the Spanish to get the oil. I, Rome, realized just why they were attacking the Spanish just in time to take the city myself and secure both my own prospects and block a rival.

So I think that the AI now understands how to get and how important strategics are. This is especially true of the Inca, as their start bias, if they start in a large expanse of hills, basically prevents their acquisition of any strategics except horses, coal, and uranium - unless they expand.

However, this type of thing needs to be given to other civs as well.

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Hard to generalize from a single example though, isn't it? Oil is usually common as dirt, if not from on-shore spots then off-shore spots (although that does require you to tech another level to exploit it) - but even if you have a single game where Oil is very rare, that's not generally the case.

There does, however, seem to be a tendency for the game to roll one of the strategic resources to be scarce in each game - sometimes it's Iron, sometimes it's Coal, sometimes it's Aluminum, sometimes it's Uranium, and yes it might probably also sometimes be Oil, although I don't remember a case of that, I've even once had Horses come out as virtually non-existent - and that does encourage some resource fight. Usually this resource is isolated with City States, forcing you to either ally them or conquer them for access to it. However, under normal circumstances, that will only be one of the strategic resources.

Obviously this is a fine balance to walk, because having all strategic resources being very rare is also a pain - particularly because being without access to one of them at all can mean almost default loss (starting without Iron certainly makes it tough to conquer it, even more so before where you needed Iron for Catapults also!), starting without Coal is a real downer once you hit Industrial. So making resources too scarce will also kill the fun of the game. I guess this is why they chose to make the map script so that the rare resources are located with CS - at least this way you won't lose it and render your own army useles if you trade for it and then DoW someone who has the resource.

Again, I feel a earn-and-consume resource system instead of the current sustaining system would help on this, because doing a one time trade for say, Iron, would make you able to recruit a Swordsman and then if you fall out of favor with whoever has the Iron you still has the Swordsman - which makes for better gameplay than the current version, where the usefulnes of your Swordsman is entirely dependant on your continuous acces to a source of Iron.

TyBoy said:

I'd really love to see them switch to doing a bit of forecasting into the future on the tech tree. In the realism department the idea that a civilization is about to "win" seems absurd. I think if they pushed those victory type techs into the future by just a couple tiers they could make the information era a lot more interesting and realistic.

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I agreed. it`s one of the reasons I don`t like the GDR. It`s a gamy `I win` button which totally pulls you out of the climb into better technology. If the GDR (for example) appeared after extensive FUTURE Tech upgrades and in around 2200 you got a GDR type exoskeleton computer thing that was actually called the `249XA Weapons Platform, the `249X` for short` I would`ve been far happier with that. It`s just lazy what they did with near future stuff.