TrentonC!!
Welcome back!!
I hope you will stay around this time! It is nice to have someone to talk to who does not keep trying to tell me how much they want to be Mr House and have a family of robots!!
(You know who you are and I know you are fine with it!!

Your constant badgering paid off! You have Mr House! Can we move forward now!?!?

)
So lets discuss!!!
You are absolutely right, there is still a butt tonne of stuff to refine, across the board from balancing to info to art. (I hope this means you would be willing to volunteer to help!

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There is so much content that needs to be brought to it's fullest self, we are a long way away from where I see the mod ending up, I am just limited in how much I can do on a given day due to my health.
I keep chipping away though!
Some people come along and help me with a jackhammer every now and then!
So onto your specific points about the tech tree:
The tech tree needs to be refined.
• Less military techs should be available early on.
(Can you elaborate by what you mean here? Too many techs early on in general or something else more specific. ThenI can respond to your concern)
• A lot of techs need to be renamed (I have a few suggestions)
1. Assigned Tasks - Skill Specialization
(This is too much of an 'advanced name' for the place you are at in the eventual narrative of the story world 'era'.
The 'feeling' I am trying to evoke is that you are a small group of people, almost literally the 5-10 people on the map before you found your town.
You have just built a fire, [maybe a few other things depending on when you research what] so as a group you are beginning to look around and think, someone needs to get fire wood, someone needs to think about food, etc. it is more at the level of Organisation and Leadership techs that you are beginning to become a 'Town' with 'Specialised Skills'.)
2. Fiddling – Tinkering
(I can accept that word change [Unless I also had tinkering as a tech later on... I am very sleepy...] Basically if I did have the two techs, it represents two stages of scientific endeavour, the first is poking things with sticks, the second is stabbing a stick into it and saying you have created a 'Stick-a-ma-jig'(Patent pending). If there is only one, then they are more or less the same word anyway, tinkering just implies a marginally greater level of confidence in the art of 'poking stuff that you don't understand'. SCIENCE!!
3. Weapons - Hierarchical Defense Force
(What tech is this? I really should look at the tech tree and wake my brain up... I know I have a few weapons techs like
Improvied Weapons, etc. Your name is again to 'advanced' for this stage of the game, we are at 'Apocalypse Survival' mildly better than a bunch of cavemen. Not organised defence forces.)
4. Gathering - Organized Prospecting
(Again too advanced Prospecting comes far later down the line, this is the stage of picking up sticks and rocks and other things that are just scattered about the ground. You don't even have the courage to go and look in that 'dead town over there' for stuff.)
5. Improvised Weapons - Improvised Weaponry
(It is a change of 2 letters

So... I have no strong feelings either way!

)
6. Basic Tools - Basic Tool Making
(Again similiar thing. One thing I will say is I was going for less of a civilization, grand history sort of naming scheme and more of a rough and ready Fallout survival vibe. The other part of it may have been that I was going on the idea that you might have found a hammer or a saw somewhere that you can use, so not every tool is hand made. It has been years since I made the first tech tree run through with Dotter!)
7. Building - City Organization
(Too Advanced, Cities are WAY!!!!!!!! Down the end of the eras, this is the Apocalypse after all!)
• Here is a suggestion for reorganizing the tech tree:
1. Skill Specialization -> Gathering
(That is 3 words? 2 Techs? There are over 100 in the tech tree?!? Also Assigned Tasks is in a [Leadership and Organisation 'Stream'] It gives workers and leads to building roads.
Gathering is in a [Collection and Production 'Stream'] As it gives a hammer building.
I understand none of this is specifically documented anywhere at the moment, it is yet another job to be done. Originally I was working with Dotter on the tech tree, he was making a set of special FTTW Tech buttons, you can see them at the start of the tech tree. I came up with an idea for the coloured flames backgrounds, each colour represents something different. If I remember rightly we had so far come up with.
Red = War and the art of generally making things bleed until no longer alive
Purple = Leadership and Organisation
Blue = Productivity and Science and Construction
Green = Food and Health
Yellow = Cash Money Baby!!
But when Dotter had to step down from doing his button making bonanza, I mostly stopped fiddling and refining the tech tree, focussing on more core structure(code) of the game. Then everything started to go wrong! Then things started to go better when new people volunteered to help make it work!
There are lots of abilities and technologies still not fully fleshed out or added to the tech tree. (For example Organised Crime concepts)
But hey, there is a reason I only call this version of the mod Alpha5!
I noticed a few typos (maybe different regional dialects?) and units that should be renamed.
• Assisans (or something to that affect) – Assassins
(That one is definately a typo! I don't know how I have missed that so many times... but then you stare at something long enough and you see what you expect to see!Or you may not have the latest version of the mod..Dunno!)
• Skavenger - Scavenger
(This is to build on the illiterate stupid survivors of the apocalypse vibe, as you get a unit called a 'Skav' so that one was an intentional misspelling to build the 'Apocalyptic Idiot' Dialect

)
• Rad bear - Yao Guai
(Yes, this is again one of those 'little jobs' that I never get around to doing. My original intention was to make the bear graphic much smaller and turn it into a 'Mole Rat'. That is mostly just cosmetics though so it is all of a minimal priority. The sort of thing a helpful new volunteer could choose to take on as a part of building up their Civ modding skill set.
I do eventually want to increase the overall quantity and content of these Beasts and Barbs, Again that is low priority though for now.)
Similarly the building tree needs a lot of refinement. The following should be renamed:
• Wooden Shack - Basic Dwelling
(Again this is to give that post 'Apocalyptic Idiot' Dialect. "I gotz me won a dem fancy wooden shacks!")
• A Work Bench – Workshop
(Again this is that apocalypse development. You start with some kind of work bench/table, if you are real fancy you might have got them to shove it into a hut or lean too, but it is not until you move down the way a bit that you get yourself an actual full fledge fancy pants Workshop!)
--End--
Do you Play Fallout 3 onwards, as opposed to playing the Original Games (You know before they turned their back on the creator and went all commercial

)
This mod spans a time frame from Pre-F1 all the way through to F3/NV Eventually I plan to mark the eras with something of that sort, so roughly speaking in my head the eras are:
Pre-F1('Stone Age' digging in the dirt Survivors picking up stuff from the ground and waving it around like they know what they are doing).
F1 (ooh is that a quaint little Village/Town I see?[Shady Sands] Oh a spralling Metropolis it has like 20 Whole Buildings!![The Hub], the first 'whiffs' of advanced tech, weapons and armour)
F2/Tactics (The Birth of The NCR, the use of Vehicles and Military Operations, The 'Annexation' of land and people willingly or otherwise, etc.)
F3/NV (Giant Super Robots and the liberal Application of Vertibirds and Water Purification, etc. The final Colonisation to the Eastern Coast of America)
Onto your Final Points!
The concepts page should also be utilized to explain the massive amount of features.
(Yes, again one of many, MANY tasks!

right now I am holding off writing the rule book, until I have finished writing the rules.
I had hoped that people would simply come and ask (Occasionally someone does) about everything and thus get involved in the discussion, debate and creation of the mod.
I even got us this shiny new Sub-Forum!
Unfortuantely by that stage the team had mostly faded away due to real life commitments, some just vanished without a word..)
Personally I feel the UI should be simplified by removing most of the Platy mods. Similarly I think the DLL modding should be scaled back.
(The short answer to this is HELL NO!!

The longer and slightly more dignified response is. I have worked long and hard to get the mod as far as it has come, a lot of these features are going to be very helpful and essential to the future of the mod and playability. Most of the features have barely been implemented, some of them do unfortunately have some functional and graphical issues.
The mod is stable though except for one crash when you mouse over the hammers in the city screen, which no one has been able to figure out why, as the problem never seems to be the same twice?!?
Flitz has just come back and volunteered to help me fix up a few bugs, that I did not discover until archid had gone back to real life after he kindly rebuilt the mod from the ground up. I am also still learning how many of the old features now work in the new build, and what ones were unfortunately lost in the reshuffle!
All the content will eventually be used and be used to good effect (I hope) it all just takes time, especially with my lack of health.
All I can do is chip away and occasionally blast forward when volunteers come on board. A few times I have wasted a lot of time making tasks and tutorials for volunteers, and they just disappear without a word...

Which is a shame.)
I also have some questions about the direction you guys are taking and some general things already implemented.
What is a ghoul farm? (A farm operated by ghouls?)
(It is a Ghoul Civ Specific Improvement.
This is a two part thing, one was I want the Ghouls to be boosted by radiation, I made the ghoul farm to be built on rad wastes(Flood Plains) and tiles with Fallout, I can also now (thanks to the lastest .Dll work by Archid) (If it is all working as it should, still chipping away at that.. I miss Gray Warden and Deadomancer they were great testers!) Give Ghouls a Trait bonus that gives them health and happiness from Fallout. Super Mutants too. Eventually a whole lot of Faction Specific content will come.
The Second part of it is a nod to F2 in which there was a farm that was said to be haunted by ghosts that no one dared go near. (I think it was Modoc) turns out it is just a farm run by Ghouls and a few humans who live in a shelter underground. So Ghoul Farm!

)
What does (V) and (SE) refer to?
(So:
(V) stands for buildings that can only be built in a Vault city, not to be confused with the location in F2; Vault City. Check the Pip Boy 2015 Section on the Forum for some basic info about Vault and Non-Vault Factions in FTTW.
(SE) Stands for 'Steve Event' which is the Prototype event for my Story Chain Event System.
(Which is currently, not quite working right but I don't know why exactly.. it is something to do with 'Quests' being 'forgotten' by the game after a certain number of turns or for some reason which I have yet to figure out why... VERY Annoying! Plus again as the only tester it takes me quite some time to test whether or not is fixed or not..So the later parts cannot find the early prereq event after about 100-200 turns on normal and so they never seem to fire. If I engineer my playthrough to get each part of the event quickly it works fine, but in a normal playthrough no such luck it seems..)
So anyway, I put (SE) in front of all buildings and units that are only available as part of the Steve Storyline. Most so that the Pedia will keep them all together so finding them, and finding anything that is not Event related a little bit easier. The content will grow in the future if I ever get the damn thing to work properly!)
I enjoy the use of civ's built in events system, is it unique for every civ?
(So this is the Story Event system, currently there is only the 'Steve the Super Mutant' Story, but once I get it working I do hope to create many Story/Consequence Events many of which will be faction specific, as well as hopefully many 'Generic' Stories will have faction and trait specific actions you can take. Just like Fallout. This takes a very long time to create though. Especially when the quests don't stick around for some £@$%$*! reason.....
To give an idea of how much effort the events took just for the Steve Story Event here are some figures.
The events code itself is about 122 A4 pages!!
It has 40ish Unique Buildings and units!
As well as about 40 possible choices of which you will only get to see a handful of each playthrough depending on the choices you make along the way..
It took me months to build the prototype, so it is very vexing when the game loses it's prereq events for no reason I can find....
Basically making these Story Events could probably fill up several peoples modding time!)
Do rad spiders exist in fallout's world? Are we adding to the games lore?
(We will be adding to the Games Lore 'Technically' because we don't get to see a lot of the workings of empire in fallout, as it is an RPG, so we have to fill in a lot of blanks, not to mention the story events which will be full of fun things, but I want to try and keep it contained within the whackiness of Fallout!
How ever the Rad Spider was there because it was the only art I had, it has just been replaced by a giant ant from Clanky which is now available in the PatchBoy1000 patch celebrating the 1000th download on moddb of the current build. You can find links to our moddb page in the Download section and the Welcome to the Wasteland Section of the forum.)
In Conclusion:
Yes you can talk to me about civics in the Civics Discussion thread.
Make sure you download the new Patch first as this has some of my early work on the revised civics, and the civics thread has more info about where they are heading in the future.
The current path of development is towards the Alpha6 (TECS) Build.
TECS Stands For:
Traits
Events
Civics
Specialists
Currently some confusing display and function bugs are trying to be solved, which is why the process is delayed, also there is a butt tonne of XML work to do with it too. (As I mentioned in just making one 3 Part Story Event)
Although I have already expanded the specialist roster to about 20 different specialists, plus adding building slots for them to work in.
I am working towards shifting the focus of city productivity more and more over to specialists, as well as how civics and traits and buildings will change the effectiveness of different specialists, so the way you build your empire will depend a lot on the kind of demographics you wish to support in your cities.
When I am done I really want FTTW to be more like a Grand Startegy game like Europa Universalis 4 or other Paradox titles so I am personally more focussed on long play games, like some of the big mods here that take a long time to get through 1000+ turns. Rather than the shorter play games. I have added two faster game speeds, but eventually I want the long plays to be the norm, not the standard civ short plays. Lot of content still to add to make this length of game feel 'Full'.
That is all a long way away though, hence we are only at Alpha5.
I began planning a lot of these things when we had a much larger team though, just after we made our own project group. Since then almost everyone has had to step away, so things are moving much slower than in the FTTW Golden Age!
I look forward to more of your thoughts.