- I'm not quite sure what is meant by "adding virtues from building another resource".
My awkwardness arises from wanting to refer to the yields, currencies, measures, and resources you obtain without specifically using their names prior to adaptation. I meant 'culture', but that doesn't sound like what ought to describe the thing involved in Social Engineering, and it may not be what you call it after the mod.
Also I say "yields, currencies, measures, resources" because
those terms aren't standardized and unfortunately picking one of them might cause misunderstanding, too. I mean stuff that you have.
Do you mean culture yields itself when you say resource or do you mean investing things like production and research into better cultural buildings and improvements?
- Is your next statement about how penalties that hurt the resources you use to earn virtues make selecting virtues not worth it, even if they give you a benefit (ignoring the strength of the benefit for now) in another area?
Culture yields themselves. I have a certain kind of economic strength, an income, in all the yields turn after turn. My strategy and the sum rules of the game make up the spending power of my colony in total. At each time, I take an option that expends one thing to give me another, but I am also continually building all of them, right?
Sometimes, or at least it's logically possible, that just as in market economies, saving might be better than spending, because the returns from nonspecific investment or inaction could be greater than investing. Sure, I could divest my yields and actions toward building beakers, say, and of course pulling ahead in any yield makes nice opportunities available that exchange the difference in Time between my colony and the others, differences that can become a kind of spending power that overtakes all alternatives (including inaction).... or there might be no such divestment that is better than just letting everything build up at the rate that it is, taking advantage of reaching some particular next milestone, exploiting that, and then later, using a certain yield at another threshold "on-time" because I didn't go and kill its unmolested trajectory.
Now, you can view this as a designer in many ways. Maybe you can design the game so that there -always- is one investment that is better than inaction. But until that condition is not true, you have an issue where adopting one of these "social artifacts" can be bad.
And in that case....
- I don't have a full understanding of the problem you are describing, but I'm also having trouble understanding the solution you've given. Is the idea that, having all players select the starts of their 4 SE choices puts everyone on the same foot in a similar way to selecting an opening loadout?
... Picking up a virtue when the game
makes you do so is a penalty. And by extension, things awarding you culture are now bad. And by extension, certain buildings and improvement features and technology changes to buildings (the ones that add culture) are now bad, just straight up bad. The Old Earth Relic is now entirely bizarre, for instance, and the culture yield sprinkled on everything else is not a bonus. . . but it's not a limiter either*. It's lost its sense of coherently being anything.
*See, like, in old Civ games, certain techs or developments would "obsolete" wonders. You can view that as a penalty, but with guarantees about the specific thing that triggers the obsolescense, it adds up to a net positive - it's just something that the designers couldn't let you , erm, couldn't write any denotable bonus to award at that stage which wouldn't be too much, say, too much in combination with certain wonders. So it is "written" as "Gain X. Lose Y" but it is deliberately balanced as a kind of (almost)-all upside, . Plus the wonder loses that bonus at that point and you know this when you start, so it's okay - the wonder may or may not be right for you, it (with obsolescence) depends on how you calculate the integral under the value-adding function for that wonder up to where you take that tech.
Another example is 'rage' in fighting games, a kind of comeback mechanic. Not all comeback mechanics actually reward losing. If they satisfy certain properties, they overall just act as a kind of tempo control, a kind of slowing down and levelling off of advantages. Being ahead is still good, and being more ahead -must- be better, and at any point, doing something to get ahead has to work out to be better than playing worse , getting a handout, and then playing on. But if that is true - as, say, with increased damage on a low health bar - it just stretches out the last few hit points. It's still better to have more hitpoints, and good to take them away from your opponent; it is merely a manner of implementing the overall "function" for the hitpoint dynamic the designer wanted
- When you say open, do you mean having all 84 virtues available to select from the start or all 12 trees open to select from the start?
I meant trees.
- I just want to point out that this is the current intention. The 84 selectable virtues are entirely bonuses, some short-term, some long-term. The penalties are deployed through the game's current virtue-synergy system, where you earned additional bonuses for heavily investing in one tree or one tier. The bonuses have been changed to penalties instead so that as you select more bonuses from a tree, you'll receive stronger and stronger penalties, but your bonuses should always supersede the penalties.
Still, there is a limit point , practically it won't happen but it's there, of having many of the buttons picked, and then you gotta add another one, and now for some reason you have to take a penalty. Same objection applies.
I guess you could design synergies right into them (emergent or literally "+2/-1 and -1/+2 is now +1/+1"), so that "just in time" , at the point where virtues in one branch would be a downside, and virtues in another tree are either that, or irrelevant (according to your value estimates /strategy), the bonuses from the alternative branches have themselves eliminated the penalties.... no, that still wouldn't work. Compared to the status quo, you're still being made to take a loss. Same objection
- Can you give more thoughts on this?
Those are my thoughts. If something is a penalty, then what -causes- you to get it must receive an entirely different conception in the design stage.
A radical option for you would be, to go, "yes, social engineering becomes tradeoffs at a point - that is how I am modelling the anthropological facts about the citizens I am leading in this colony." Just as designing particular discrete options in Civ games of old are implicitly a statement that "this is naturally how people will be able to act and associate under your direction: In a monarchy, or a wide flat empire, or e.g. as people who need the riches of certain terrain for luxury to put up with empire stability; as opposed to literally everything conceivable you could tell them to do." However, that modelling choice burdens you to make culture awards into an appropriate concept. Something that animates yet polarizes the people. Culture is now, it seems to my rough 10 minute speculation, something like a demand for change, but a willingness to evolve. The colony has gained a kind of confidence, yet forward-lookingness, to become more something in particular.
It can't go around like a bonus anymore. But it isn't strictly a penalty of course. It's a thing that happens. You need to put culture awards in the right place so that the change it triggers look like the right causes of that 'thing' happening.
I did have plans to have the diplomacy category be the most fluid of all the categories, making them very tempting to switch between depending on the global situation.
Asymmetries are killer. You'll be more hobbled in streamline balance knobs, your A.I. will be more confused, and how could the gameplay not become overcentralized? If one branch acts different, people will want one region for how it acts, over and above what it does.
As nice as the illustrations are, I am probably going with the stars. It is a lot clearer, especially if I go in and tweak some of the highlight behaviors for selected trees and their brightness.
I think something called an 'alpha layer' is what can create that lighting effect.
Maybe a mix of all. Use stars at base, import in the picture once you unlock a branch, but mask the picture (and all unlocked pictures) when not mousing over actual buttons. Put the shadow lightning over the specific branch at the mouse pointer.
That could be horribly ugly, I'm just offering to break any frames you trapped yourself in.
