How to design a tech tree ?

[Laozu]

Hey guys!
I'm trying to design a new tech tree from scratch for my mod.
And I thought that a tutorial on tech tree design issues and advices would be nice, but I didn't find any. I think that the tech tree best represents the mod you are trying to create, because it contains every info on what will happen during the game : what will be possible, when, thanks to what choices ? And it also contains a lot of opportunities for game-play balancing or unbalancing if you create a tech tree with multiple independent branches like I'm trying to do : will all paths be balanced in the possibilities/advantages they give, how to avoid useless "filling" techs while keeping the desired speed of tech advancement, what should be available early in the game to all players regardless of their chosen path?
So, if anyone that has already created a complete tech tree and has been successful can give any advice, that would help me a lot ! Thanks !

 

[The_J]

There's more than one mod out there with a completly new tech tree, every total conversion mod has a new one .

There's also a small design tutorial out there, it's here.


Basic things from my "experience" (which you sure can also figure out with common sense):
- Every tech needs a unique name (just numbers are boring)
- Every tech must unlock something, better 2 things
- But they should not unlock more than 5 things (besides the imbalance, you'll get graphical problems on the screen)
- There should be side connections, only going straight forward is boring
- The connections have to be logical (somehow...)

Haven't thought about more when doing mine, but that can maybe be seen when looking at it .


The only real problem with the tech tree is, what you've already said, that it represents nearly everything from your game. And so everything from your game is somehow connected to it. And that's a f***ing big amount of work to shift all the things around in the tree.

 

[Laozu]

Thanks a lot for the link, that is what I was looking for !

The biggest problem I have now is because I want players to chose a path between a few, every path should lead to equally rewarding capacities. However every branch should still offer different things and lead to a different objective, so I have trouble balancing it all.

But it looks like the tutorial answers a lot of my questions ^^
(I wonder why I didn't find it in the first place)