Falcon02
General
Right now we pretty much make our tech decisions by re-polling each game session, or just the Chieftain's general feeling from tech discussions (I think this has only happened once).
Now, as people have pointed out, this has and can give our civilization a lack of focus... jumping from one track to another. Thankfully, we recently regained some focus when working towards Alphabet, because everyone agreed on one concise path, and followed it.
Also this system, particularly now, doesn't work out so well when we're researching 3 turn or 4 turn technologies. That makes it hard to either to have a full length game session or to poll each technology individually. To properly vote on all techs now every Tech poll must anticipate a second poll to see what we should research after the first. Should the first poll have a relatively short researched tech win, a second poll would be needed to determine what's afterwards (or it ends up being left to the Chieftain's or DP's digression, as it may this time around)
I would also comment how, no poll was set up this time around, until... well... 18 minutes after the scheduled time for the game session... But that's not so much mechanics as a need to delegate responsibility, as people keep expecting someone else to do it. Something that's has had some discussion elsewhere, with creating a Science office.
However, given these issues with the current system, I started to think about how things were done in the past. I namely looked at Civ3 DG1, since that's the one I'm most familiar with.
For most of it, particularly early on I saw little to no Science polls (everything was apparently simply discussed in the respective Government thread and discussion threads, and then the Science official made a decision based on that. This is not what we want this Demogame... and should be avoided.
However, I think there were some things to be learned. Primarily... "Research Queues," and people here have touched on that, but it's never really been implemented. Official tech instructions normally had 5 or more techs on them, in sequential order. The DP would then put them in queue in-game (shift-click), so that once we were done with one tech, the game would automatically go on to the next tech. If we traded for something on that queue, it just went on to the next item after that.
I also found, what I think is an example of a good decision making process for a queue...
Exhibit A: "Science Proposal" discussion thread
Someone (in this case the Science Official) posts a thread with their proposal and opens it for discussion. Various people give their own proposals for the build queue.
Exhibit B: "Research Poll" subsequent poll from above thread
All these proposals are placed in a poll for the final decision. Some stand alone techs were included as well, but I'm not sure why, because it would appear not all the individual tech options at the time were included....
Anyway, for our purposes we could use the repoll process to narrow down various proposals into 2-3 options from which we can get a majority decision. This would prevent uncertainty as to what tech is next. If something unexpected happens that causes us to reevaluate our research path, I don't think it would be too hard to repoll this, "shall we replace tech X with tech Y?" or "shall we move tech X to the front of the research queue?" etc.
Also, to preempt Ravensfire, none of our demogames were perfect (at least none of the ones I was here for). However, it is good to look back on the past, cause you can learn both from the failures of the past and the successes of the past.
Now, as people have pointed out, this has and can give our civilization a lack of focus... jumping from one track to another. Thankfully, we recently regained some focus when working towards Alphabet, because everyone agreed on one concise path, and followed it.
Also this system, particularly now, doesn't work out so well when we're researching 3 turn or 4 turn technologies. That makes it hard to either to have a full length game session or to poll each technology individually. To properly vote on all techs now every Tech poll must anticipate a second poll to see what we should research after the first. Should the first poll have a relatively short researched tech win, a second poll would be needed to determine what's afterwards (or it ends up being left to the Chieftain's or DP's digression, as it may this time around)
I would also comment how, no poll was set up this time around, until... well... 18 minutes after the scheduled time for the game session... But that's not so much mechanics as a need to delegate responsibility, as people keep expecting someone else to do it. Something that's has had some discussion elsewhere, with creating a Science office.
However, given these issues with the current system, I started to think about how things were done in the past. I namely looked at Civ3 DG1, since that's the one I'm most familiar with.
For most of it, particularly early on I saw little to no Science polls (everything was apparently simply discussed in the respective Government thread and discussion threads, and then the Science official made a decision based on that. This is not what we want this Demogame... and should be avoided.
However, I think there were some things to be learned. Primarily... "Research Queues," and people here have touched on that, but it's never really been implemented. Official tech instructions normally had 5 or more techs on them, in sequential order. The DP would then put them in queue in-game (shift-click), so that once we were done with one tech, the game would automatically go on to the next tech. If we traded for something on that queue, it just went on to the next item after that.
I also found, what I think is an example of a good decision making process for a queue...
Exhibit A: "Science Proposal" discussion thread
Someone (in this case the Science Official) posts a thread with their proposal and opens it for discussion. Various people give their own proposals for the build queue.
Exhibit B: "Research Poll" subsequent poll from above thread
All these proposals are placed in a poll for the final decision. Some stand alone techs were included as well, but I'm not sure why, because it would appear not all the individual tech options at the time were included....
Anyway, for our purposes we could use the repoll process to narrow down various proposals into 2-3 options from which we can get a majority decision. This would prevent uncertainty as to what tech is next. If something unexpected happens that causes us to reevaluate our research path, I don't think it would be too hard to repoll this, "shall we replace tech X with tech Y?" or "shall we move tech X to the front of the research queue?" etc.
Also, to preempt Ravensfire, none of our demogames were perfect (at least none of the ones I was here for). However, it is good to look back on the past, cause you can learn both from the failures of the past and the successes of the past.
)
