Proposition for Practical Research and Theoretical Research system:
Following up on the thread that chrome brought up (written by Andrimner, G-d bless him), I'd like to propose how this would work in game.
First of all, I think that this system should be game changing, though not altering the gameplay so much as that it makes gameplay too complicated. I thought a while about how this could be achieved while adding this brilliant idea into the mod. This is what I thought of:
1. Introduction to the Practical Research and Theoretical Research system:
To those who haven't read the thread yet, I highly suggest it,
you can read it here. But in summary, the idea is this: Scientific research is comprised of both theoretical and practical realms. Theoretical research is the mechanic that the game uses now - Science progresses regardless of how much practical research you've done. Practical research would be a way of using practical development of the empire to move research forward. In other words, if you're more developed in a certain realm, you research it better, because you have practical experience.
2. How this would improve the game:
Currently, the "special" powers that civs get are not defined by how they actually act, rather, it is simply a perk that is set before the game. Now why on earth should they have this perk without actually even doing anything? The idea of PR (Practical Research) is that practice makes perfect, and therefore, when researching something you practice a lot, such as a well developed navy, you should be able to research navy better than a nation who does not. Same goes for culture, commerce, military, science and engineering. If you put more effort into something, you're empire should be better at researching it than any other empire, right?
In order to give every player the feeling that he is, in fact, affecting the development of his empire by choosing which path to take. If he likes culture, his empire will specialize in culture, if he is a warmonger-er, he will research military faster. I feel that this addition to the game will make it feel more epic in the sense that your actions and decisions will have an even bigger impact on how you will fare in the future.
3. The issues with a system like this:
There are a few issues with this idea that I took into account while planning how this might work, and here are a few of them:
- If 1000 years ago a civ was best at navy and now it isn't, it shouldn't keep getting a bonus. We need a system that would correctly reflect if a civ stopped becoming the elite in a certain area.
- This system needs to be relatively easy to use and simple to understand.
- It needs to be challenging enough to be awarded only to those that deserve it.
4. How this would work:
I thought about how this would work in game without complicating things too much. My idea is that each area of research will have a "gauge". This gauge will show the average PRP (Practical Research Points) over the last 10 turns. I will use culture as an example to explain how this would work:
- The PR Guage:
The culture PR gauge will be set by incoming culture each turn. Say the user has 1 city and a few culture buildings providing +3 culture, he has in total +3 PRP. The PR gauge will now be 3. If the player were to do something like building a wonder, he would get a boost to the PR gauge (say 10 points). How would building a wonder effect his PR gauge? Let's do the math: If his current average PR is 3, and this turn's PR was 13 then: (3*9+13)/10=4. This shows that by having a 10 point boost in this turn, he bumped up his average of the last 10 turns up to 4. It will take approximately 10 turns for this to drop back down to 3 (unless he builds more culture buildings).
- The affect of PR on research:
Now how will this gauge affect research? Each gauge will have a cap, decided by which tech tier you are in any area (or age, or world average, not sure yet), and depending how much PR you have we can calculate how much % you have from the cap. So say in our case, if the cap was 5 for culture (see part 3 for setting the PR cap), by building the wonder, he now has 80% Practical Research. Now I'm not sure how much exactly this should effect research, but say this would add a whole 80% to research, so if he had 5 beakers, it would now become 9 beakers because of his 80% PR bonus. If you were to advance in a tech tier (in ANY area) without advancing culture-wise, the cap would go higher, and your PR % would go down, slowly loosing your lead in culture. We could also set a minimal percentage of the cap in order to get a bonus, OR set a offset so that as time goes on, your previous cultural buildings don't effect your PR gauge as much (again, something a bit of math can't handle).
- Setting the cap for PR:
Now the cap could be decided by a type of equation, such as: (TIER_MAX * NUMBER_OF_CITIES). TIER_MAX being the maximum amount of culture you could get from culture buildings in that tier (this means that if you neglected culture research and advanced elsewhere, you'd be a higher tier, and therefore, the cap rises while you fall behind). We'd be be able to multiply the equation to offset the drop that will happen by advancing a tier, before building the culture buildings AND the fact that certain cities (the weaker ones) will take a while to build it, but that's just a thought... Now notice that this doesn't take into account culture CSs, this is because that is basically an advantage that can bring you closer and faster to your cap.
If you think about it, reaching you cap is very difficult, and in certain cases impossible, and I think it should be this way, because it is a very large bonus!
NOTE: This example was for culture, though it could work for any area, such as military, units giving points per strength, military building giving certain points, and war/xp pushing your PR gauge up. Same goes for currency, engineering and science (research itself should also have practical research!). This might require some balancing, but it's definitely doable.
5. How this would be seen by the player:
Now I'm not really sure how I envision this, but say the player is now looking at the main research page. In addition to the buttons to the tech trees, we could show the gauges showing how many PR points he has relative to the cap (basically a completion bar, like the culture win bar). And when researching, you'd see your total research beakers, and when mousing over, it would say something like this:
+130
total research per turn.
- 100 from cities
- 20 from practical research (eg. cultural)
- 10 from CSs
...
This is basically a draft of how I'd see this working in game. We could incorporate the new CS idea with this and make things even more epic. I made a few graphs in excel that show progression of an example game where someone was going for a cultural win. By building many culture buildings, the culture PR stayed around 80% of the cap, and once neglected, quickly fell away (took maybe 2-3 tiers until it dropped low). And like I said before, we could also have a drop-off point where if lower than that, you don't get a bonus, so that would happen faster.
What do you guys think? Feedback is most welcome
I was worried at first, but I see that the AI can at least handle playing that far, even if it isn't completely good at it yet. 
)) now, but I will be coming back to this post often when we do the serious planning. Hopefully in a few hours I can come up with something more satisfying, but I can tell you that you have made me think.
! Haha, just playing. I have no problem sharing what's happening behind the scenes. I just have a habit of not wanting to disclose anything until I am sure about the finality of things. In this case, it's fine.
