Necessity is the mother of invention . . .

[CGG1066]

maybe just give bonuses to particular techs researching?
e.g. you research iron working. if you go to war and kill enemy units - you get free beakers towards it. get cattle resources inside borders to speed up animal husbandry, etc. such a funny little quest for each technology.

That is actually an alternative I thought of early on, rather than my initial suggestion to use SWUs (described in my first post, which don't create beakers, but are ways of dividing them up).

One problem with it is that it could encourage players to do strange things just for the sake of doing things to get beakers. For example, building roads and tearing them up and building them again, just to move along construction/trade techs. Not that such gaming is an inevitable consequence of the system. It's an idea that defiantly needs looking into (I just chose my other implementation idea to get the discussion started).

 

[killmeplease]

One problem with it is that it could encourage players to do strange things just for the sake of doing things to get beakers. For example, building roads and tearing them up and building them again, just to move along construction/trade techs.

i thought of it when devised examples so i havent given an example for a currency. of cource introducing of such quests provoking exploits should be avoided.

 

[Camikaze]

maybe just give bonuses to particular techs researching?
e.g. you research iron working. if you go to war and kill enemy units - you get free beakers towards it. get cattle resources inside borders to speed up animal husbandry, etc. such a funny little quest for each technology.

I think this could be a good compromise for the implementation of this idea.

One problem with it is that it could encourage players to do strange things just for the sake of doing things to get beakers. For example, building roads and tearing them up and building them again, just to move along construction/trade techs. Not that such gaming is an inevitable consequence of the system. It's an idea that defiantly needs looking into (I just chose my other implementation idea to get the discussion started).

It shouldn't be too much of a problem if the qualifications for research discounts are set well. The instance you mention would be negated by making the qualification have to do with the number of tiles with roads, rather than the number of roads built.

 

[CGG1066]

Yeah - I see what you mean. I'm open to the idea; but there can very well be unintended consequences. If it were number of roads built, then that encourages people to build too many roads, so you have to increase maintenance, but then people don't build buildings to save elsewhere . . . how many roads equal a library? Will players build a lot of roads to no where in order to push trading techs and tear them up later?

Also, will this make the big/small tech divide worse, as large civs do more actions?

. . . like I said, defiantly an implementation option worth looking in to, but I don't think you could really say either option is superior to the other without testing it out (and the considerations for my initial post were more to keep things simple to bring up the concept).

And as always, I'm not a modder, I'm more concerned with creating ideas rather than implementing them - and I realize that implementation always changes things. I guess I'm just trying to see if other people like my concepts so that somebody (mods or devs for cVI [shoot - that one doesn't work]) might incorporate them into the game.

 

[eric_]

ciVI (civvy) FTW!

This thread, as well as my thread about diplomacy and trade pacts, has gotten me seriously interested in modding. We'll see...

 

[Ktulu]

It's always bothered me how (as one example) you need to research masonry in order to use marble, when really it should be the other way around - having marble should lead to your discovery of masonry. So this idea in some form appeals to me.

However, there a few significant obstacles to overcome...

- How do you translate this concept across the entire tech tree? Sure it works really well early in the game with techs like animal husbandry, iron working, sailing etc. but how do you implement techs like flight, lazers, ecology, particle physics?

- You need to make sure that a civs starting location doesn't "over influence" the path a civ can take

I think there needs to be a combination of choosing what to research, but also having circumstances and actions influence the research path. How do you achieve that balance?

 

[CGG1066]

- How do you translate this concept across the entire tech tree? Sure it works really well early in the game with techs like animal husbandry, iron working, sailing etc. but how do you implement techs like flight, lazers, ecology, particle physics?

This is from my first post (as I thought about this problem too):

"Mitigating feature: with the discovery of "scientific theory": you get to assign all science from buildings, specialists, and wonders to the tech of your choice. For example, if I have 300 science total (200 science coming from my cities, 100 from buildings/specialists), the first 200 is apportioned by the described above method, and I can choose to put the last 100 towards refrigeration."

So, you're right that things break down in the late industrial/modern era. But by that time you'll have buildings, specialists, wonders that you can use to steer development. Buildings/specialists may need to be beefed up - but that's not hard. (arguably, the reason why the system breaks down in the real world is because humans used scientific theory to think critically, rather than rely on experience).

[Although, things like building the Apollo program, missiles, spaceship parts, probably give a pretty natural bonus to particle physics.]

 

[Johan de Witt]

I could see this have quite a (in my eyes positive) influence on the game.

Instead of just one click on a button, the player would be stearing his civilization in order to get the inventions he wants.

A great way this could work: The availability of iron and horses.
If there is a lot of iron within your borders, your military could really flourish and you would gain many small improvements to troops like swordsmen. Perhaps even leading to specialist troops like legions or samurai.
If there are a lot of horses within your borders, you would gain access to many different types of cavalry forces.
When neither is available but you still have a lot of units, your archery really increases over time.

 

[CGG1066]

I could see this have quite a (in my eyes positive) influence on the game.

Instead of just one click on a button, the player would be stearing his civilization in order to get the inventions he wants.

A great way this could work: The availability of iron and horses.
If there is a lot of iron within your borders, your military could really flourish and you would gain many small improvements to troops like swordsmen. Perhaps even leading to specialist troops like legions or samurai.
If there are a lot of horses within your borders, you would gain access to many different types of cavalry forces.
When neither is available but you still have a lot of units, your archery really increases over time.

Right! It's a civilization does as you do, not as you say type of mechanic. If you really want to be a war monger - you have to act like one. If you really want to be a trader, you have to be one.

 

[Camikaze]

Being able to adapt is an important part of the game, but being able to shape your own destiny is also important. If you make the path that your civ takes too dependent upon randomness (that is, features of the map), then you lose control of that destiny. If you have no strategic resources, it will become much harder for you to pursue military techs, meaning that you cannot do that, so your civilization cannot go in that direction. As it is, the features of the map only partially shape your civilization's destiny, but if you add a lot of extra importance to those features, then certain paths will simply be off realistic limits.

 

[CGG1066]

Being able to adapt is an important part of the game, but being able to shape your own destiny is also important. If you make the path that your civ takes too dependent upon randomness (that is, features of the map), then you lose control of that destiny. If you have no strategic resources, it will become much harder for you to pursue military techs, meaning that you cannot do that, so your civilization cannot go in that direction. As it is, the features of the map only partially shape your civilization's destiny, but if you add a lot of extra importance to those features, then certain paths will simply be off realistic limits.

True - but maybe it will force not to run the same game over and over again?

I really don't think this is that big of a problem. Look at a late-early game map. You usually have several options in directions to expand - what territory you get is mostly by choice (except your capital).

 

[Camikaze]

You can already not run the same game over and over again if you want. I don't particularly see you should be forced to do so. Perhaps it wouldn't be much of an issue, though. It's hard to tell whether or not it would be balanced enough to allow for much choice.

 

[Johan de Witt]

Being able to adapt is an important part of the game, but being able to shape your own destiny is also important. If you make the path that your civ takes too dependent upon randomness (that is, features of the map), then you lose control of that destiny. If you have no strategic resources, it will become much harder for you to pursue military techs, meaning that you cannot do that, so your civilization cannot go in that direction. As it is, the features of the map only partially shape your civilization's destiny, but if you add a lot of extra importance to those features, then certain paths will simply be off realistic limits.

Perhaps we don't agree or perhaps we don't understand each other, so I'll try to elaborate.

Right now: Starting position has no iron or horses. You are pretty much boned and will have to quickly build loads of units (probably a lot of archers) to grab such a resource or try to weather the storm until an age comes up for which you do have the resources.

My idea: Starting position has no iron or horses. You start building great amounts of archers to make up for your lack of resourses. Because this will actually make your archers a lot stronger (think babylonian archers, chu-ko nu), you will be able to take other empires with a lesser military on even if they have iron or horses. You might even choose not too build too many iron units after you conquer a neigbour because your archers are becomming great units (ofcourse the swordsmen will be stronger than the units you used to defend your archers with before).

 

[V. Soma]

Let me throw in my idea (again), as I started this thread about it.

You will see tech "conditions" in it...
As an alternative, or plus:
(plus) conditions could be so as to speed up techs, as suggested by some of you here...

EDIT:
an example:
TECH: Mining
Condition to start tech: you need to to have a hill in own area.
Speeding Condition perhaps: you need to have luxury mineral (gold, silver, gems) in own area...

 

[Johan de Witt]

Let me throw in my idea (again), as I started this thread about it.

You will see tech "conditions" in it...
As an alternative, or plus:
(plus) conditions could be so as to speed up techs, as suggested by some of you here...

EDIT:
an example:
TECH: Mining
Condition to start tech: you need to to have a hill in own area.
Speeding Condition perhaps: you need to have luxury mineral (gold, silver, gems) in own area...

Yeah, I think those two ideas aren't far off. Just viewed from a different angle.

Does anyone know whether the modding tools already allow stuff like this?

 

[CYZ]

If anybody would make a mod for this I'd play CiV ten times more than I do now.