Should we even have a Tech Tree in Civ VI?

[Blkbird]

The basic concept of any Civ game is one person (you, the player) with absolute dictatorial power leading a civilization through several millennia with perfect continuity. No part of that is remotely realistic. Any complaint about the lack of realism in other aspects of the game - especially in the too much foresight / too much direct control department - dwarfs against the utterly unrealistic basic concept - and has to be considered with that in perspective.

In the real world, the research priority of any civilization changes every few decades, if not years. It changes with internal demands, external circumstances, prevailing mood of the people and most of all, with the succession of political leadership.

More fundamentally, only a minority of leaders in world history has ever wielded enough power and influence to see a significant portion of his policies actually being implemented and enforced on the ground. Now, do you really want to play a game where most of the time, only 10% to 40% of your commands are being followed?

 

[ThisNameIsTooLo]

Now, do you really want to play a game where most of the time, only 10% to 40% of your commands are being followed?

Science only makes up about 30% of the game, so really about 70% of your commands would be directly followed, under your logic.

Anyway, the idea isn't that people will research whatever they feel like, but rather that you have to create an environment for the people that will be conducive to what technologies you want to develop.

• Want an industrial powerhouse? Settle more cities near lots of hills and forests, and build mines and lumbermills before anything else; technologies in metalworking and machinery will really speed up.
• Want an empire spanning multiple continents? Settle near lots of coasts, and improve coastal resources, build lots of ships, and uncover as many ocean tiles as you can manage with said ships. That'll really drive up the people's desire to see what's beyond the blue.
• Want a cultural epicenter? Build lots of Culture-producing buildings and-- oh wait, that's always how Cultural victory has worked.

 

[Blkbird]

I get what you're saying. My point is that from realism perspective, what you suggest is a drop in the bucket; and from gameplay perspective, replacing direct control with indirect control does not automatically enrich the game - it may, but it remains to be proven that:

additional fun >= additional stress over complexity + additional frustration over unpredictability

You're been trying to make the realism argument (lost cause) and explain potential additional fun. But it doesn't appear you've given serious consideration to the right side of the equation above.

 

[ftl]

I think of your suggestion in a slightly different light - it's making research a manual process for the player, with different requirements.

Like, to research Sailing, you'd have to build a unit of some kind and send it to hang out on the coast. To research mining, you have a population unit work on a hill. And so on. I'm sure it's possible to make things like this take up the entirety of the tech web, where there's actual requirements for the players' units to do to make progress, and I think it would be a plausible system.

The Eureka moments system is kind of midway between the completely chosen tech tree and the completely unit-determined one. The player has control via menu of the option they want to research, but there's a lot of "natural" things that get represented via the eureka moments - like, actually spending time near an ocean is what gets you halfway to knowing sailing, etc.

Based on the interviews it sounded to me like they experimented with different ratios of planned versus eureka research, and settled on 50% as the most balanced one, one that led the eureka moments to matter a lot but not make your tech progress completely determined by the map. So I'd trust that assessment.

 

[chrisp0394]

KILL HIM WITH FIRE. Oh wait, we haven't researched that yet

 

[Magil]

I get what you're saying. My point is that from realism perspective, what you suggest is a drop in the bucket; and from gameplay perspective, replacing direct control with indirect control does not automatically enrich the game - it may, but it remains to be proven that:

additional fun >= additional stress over complexity + additional frustration over unpredictability

You're been trying to make the realism argument (lost cause) and explain potential additional fun. But it doesn't appear you've given serious consideration to the right side of the equation above.

I can add to this that I like the tech tree. While I preferred a more flexible tech tree like 4's "or" branches, I do think we should have direct control over what we research.

I would not like the tools to be taken out of my hands, as it were. This is a game where we have near-divine control over our Civilization and that's how I like it. The "realism" slope is a slippery one, and while I know some people love nigh-uncontrollable revolutions and religious fervor and the like--as in history, leaders often had little control of their circumstances, in the end, I don't feel like that's what the Civilization series of games is about, nor is it what I want it to be about. There are always mods for that kind of thing, like Civ4's Rhyse and Fall or whatever it's called.

Control is a very powerful and very important thing. This is, after all, a strategy game. The less control you have, the less ability you have to make meaningful strategic decisions.