ship tech tree

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marhawkman
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ship tech tree

#1 Post by marhawkman »

what is the possibility of having some sort of random factor in ship tech? I remember this getting mentioned before but random tech items only really work if it's equipment for ships. The idea here is to make it so "refinements" to ship techs take the form of randomized modifications to existing techs. There's still the development of new techs, but there's only going to be so many of them. Being able to research refinements to existing techs makes for a deeper level of ship tech.
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Zpock
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#2 Post by Zpock »

Yeah I have thought a lot about this. Would try to come up with a huge amount of modifiers and then the ship component would get a random selection of them. Like these mostly weapon style modifiers I dreamed up in this list:
  • Shield piercing
    Armor piercing
    Extra damage to shield
    Extra damage if there is no shield
    Slows enemies movement
    Slows enemies rate of fire
    Slows enemies in radius around ship
    Jams missiles
    Jams torpedoes etc
    Extra cheap
    Longer range
    Shorter range
    Damage Falls of with range
    Jumps to one or several targets
Ok you get the idea, with this everyone would end up with all kinds of crazy stuff and the tech tree could go on forever.

The advantage of having players get random stuff over just letting them choose exactly what they want is that you don't get everyone using the same best thing every time (since they simply can't). This would be compared to what would happen if you simply let the players create their own techs picking from the same list wich could also be interesting in it's own right. The standard usual approach would be to make a tech tree with set components that have a few of the abilities from that list set in stone. I don't know if the random approach is really that hugely merited, some people would argue that it might lead to player frustration. For example if someone thinks he's getting shafted by the random generation gods. Others that everything can be perfectly balanced or at least there can be several viable strategies anyway.

A few could even recognize that learning those superior strategies are an important part of the game. Almost all games have lots of options that make no sense at all in the eyes of the experienced player. Useless choices that at first seem like balancing mistakes, but I think they are actually put in on purpose to introduce more "learning curve". That and it actually might be more fun for the average guy playing and knowing your using a best strategy in an unbalanced game then playing a perfectly balanced games where all strategies are equal. Makes the player feel like he's powerful and that he's doing something right.

Then there's nothing as thought provoking and intrigueing as a seemingly totally useless ability, unit, card or whatever. Certain Questions will forever haunt the minds of the players such as:
  • Is it a hidden gem...?
    Can it be actually useful in some arcane scenario?
    Whyyyyyy did they make it so worthless?
    Why was it put in at all if it's so useless?
    How could it be made useful?
    Will it be made useful in an upcoming patch?
Back to the randomly generated game content, I havn't seen anyone try this and would be interested in how it would end up in the end.
Last edited by Zpock on Tue Mar 21, 2006 5:11 am, edited 2 times in total.

marhawkman
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#3 Post by marhawkman »

Zpock wrote:Ok you get the idea, with this everyone would end up with all kinds of crazy stuff and the tech tree could go on forever.
That's the basic idea. And the randomness aspect makes Tech trading more useful. In most games you either: A. resolve the game before everybody maxes out their Tech, or B. Things get boring since there's nothing left to research.
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utilae
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#4 Post by utilae »

I think rather than random techs, you should have custom techs.

So this mainly applies to ship design. Or maybe research. You could in the research screen (at extra cost) design your own tech. So you would have standard techs, eg Laser. But then there might be the option to create your own. You could design a weapon for example. Choose the style of weapon, eg beam, wave, missile. Choose some mods.

Of course if we have standard research, I think we just need to avoid having repetitive or redundant techs, eg laser cannon, fusion cannon (just stronger versions of the old one). In these cases, we could pile the repetitive techs into refinements. So you research fusion cannon through refinements of laser.

Yeah, i would like techs to be unique and lots of interesting and unique effects, eg weapons that slow, stop, haste. And like techs in the obscure techs thread.

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Geoff the Medio
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#5 Post by Geoff the Medio »

It's not necessary to randomize the tech tree to get people using different stuff within a single game or between different games.

A more integrated and consistent mechanism would be to have lots of semi-redundant ship parts that all depend on access to one or more of several different strategic resources. Individual resources would be scarce, but resources in general would be common and easy to acquire (so you'd be sure to have some resources, but just not necessarily a particular resource you might want).

All techs would be available to anyone (or at least most techs), but which ship parts you can use would be dependent on which resources you have available or are able to secure access to or trade for.

Unlike Civ3, where if you don't have the single essential resource for all good units in an era, there would be redundancy, so you're not completely unable to compete if missing a single resource.

marhawkman
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#6 Post by marhawkman »

utilae wrote:I think rather than random techs, you should have custom techs.

So this mainly applies to ship design. Or maybe research. You could in the research screen (at extra cost) design your own tech. So you would have standard techs, eg Laser. But then there might be the option to create your own. You could design a weapon for example. Choose the style of weapon, eg beam, wave, missile. Choose some mods.

Of course if we have standard research, I think we just need to avoid having repetitive or redundant techs, eg laser cannon, fusion cannon (just stronger versions of the old one). In these cases, we could pile the repetitive techs into refinements. So you research fusion cannon through refinements of laser.

Yeah, i would like techs to be unique and lots of interesting and unique effects, eg weapons that slow, stop, haste. And like techs in the obscure techs thread.
That's the idea I'm really aiming for here. It's just that I also like the idea of not being 100% sure what you'll get when the researching is done. Like attempting to research more powerful guided missiles, but instead getting shielded guided missiles. :p I suppose it'd be a good idea to be able to specify what refinement you would like to have, but I'd make it so you'd only actually have a 50-30% greater chance of getting it. Then again I'd also make it so certain refinements are only available once you've researched other stuff. Like the shielded missiles example, you can't get shielded missiles if you don't have shieldding.
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Krikkitone
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#7 Post by Krikkitone »

I do like this ides, it allows some of the feeling of randomness in the tech tree without dealing with the nasty balance issues of a truly random tech tree.

I'm thinking it would act like the options, so that say you researched Laser Cannons, you would have to research more to have a chance of getting PD Lasers or Spinal Mount Lasers... or Armor Piercing, Auto Fire

Each tech would have a list of 'refinement options'... some would be unavailable (no PD Stellar Converters) for that tech... others might cost more, Auto Fire Lasers costing more than PD Lasers.

A side effect to encourage this could be
1. Making the cost of researching refinements be effected by your use of that technology (the more lasers you use, the easier it is to refine them)... as a SLIGHT effect

2. Making it easier to upgrade with refinements than to upgrade with a new tech (so upgrading a Warp Engine to a fuel-efficient Warp Engine is cheaper than replacing it with a Pulse Engine...which is also more fuel efficient than a default Warp Engine)

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Geoff the Medio
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#8 Post by Geoff the Medio »

marhawkman wrote:...not being 100% sure what you'll get when the researching is done. Like attempting to research more powerful guided missiles, but instead getting shielded guided missiles.
Why? That would be quite annoying in practice, I suspect. It's not like the MOO system of randomly hiding a few techs from a player, but still letting the player make a choice about which of the available techs to get or skip; it just makes the outcome of the player's "choice" random, which makes it less of a meaningful choice, which isn't really a good thing. It would also be rather confusing and hard to integrate well into the UI, as it is rather unlike the rest of the research system, which has a fixed set of techs that are enqueued specifically, not a "research something... maybe in this area" type system.

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#9 Post by marhawkman »

Geoff the Medio wrote:
marhawkman wrote:...not being 100% sure what you'll get when the researching is done. Like attempting to research more powerful guided missiles, but instead getting shielded guided missiles.
Why? That would be quite annoying in practice, I suspect. It's not like the MOO system of randomly hiding a few techs from a player, but still letting the player make a choice about which of the available techs to get or skip; it just makes the outcome of the player's "choice" random, which makes it less of a meaningful choice, which isn't really a good thing. It would also be rather confusing and hard to integrate well into the UI, as it is rather unlike the rest of the research system, which has a fixed set of techs that are enqueued specifically, not a "research something... maybe in this area" type system.
Well deciding you want something increases your odds of geting it. There'd be at least a 50% chance of that. And if you don't get it you can always do another research project to try again. Maybe it'd be better if it was 75%.
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#10 Post by Geoff the Medio »

marhawkman wrote:Maybe it'd be better if it was 75%.
Or 100% ? Changing the number to anything less than 100% doesn't really answer my question / concern...

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#11 Post by marhawkman »

Geoff the Medio wrote:
marhawkman wrote:Maybe it'd be better if it was 75%.
Or 100% ? Changing the number to anything less than 100% doesn't really answer my question / concern...
But that takes out the randomness..... I like the idea of having it guaranteed that you get what's in the base tech tree, but "advanced" techs aren't in any way guaranteed.

The idea here is that your scientists attempt to research an improvement, but there's a chance that they won't be able to get it done the first time. Instead they end up with something else that's not necessarily gonn help you.

Example: "We're sorry Sire, but the research project failed to find a way to improve the damage of Phopton torpedos. However we did find a way to make them faster."
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#12 Post by Geoff the Medio »

marhawkman wrote:But that takes out the randomness.....
Aside from saying you want it, you haven't justified adding that kind of randomness to the game. IMO that kind of randomness sucks, for the reasons mentioned... How would it improve the player's experience or strategic options and choices? If randomness is needed in this part of the game, then other kinds of randomness could be added instead, which would hopefully not suck.

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#13 Post by marhawkman »

Well.... I think it'd make research more interesting. Besides It'd make for Major cheapness being able to just to one weapon and constantly research damage improvements to it. :roll:
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#14 Post by Geoff the Medio »

marhawkman wrote:Well.... I think it'd make research more interesting.
Randomly not getting what you want isn't the ideal way to make things interesting. Interesting should be achived through giving the player interesting and meaningful choices, particularly at the strategic level. It's ok for there to be some randomness in how the details of battle work out, or when events happen, but higher level strategic choices such as what weapons you have are really better done with choices determining the final result of what you get. Interesting choices can be given due to some randomness as well, like in MOO, though what result you get from the choice shouldn't be random.
...It'd make for Major cheapness being able to just to one weapon and constantly research damage improvements to it. :roll:
Why would damage improvements be cheap, but other improvements not?

Also, there have been various discussions about how refinements could work to require a variety of weapons to be used. You couldn't just refine a single weapon indefinitely, or could but would get very diminishing returns by doing so, and would have to decide when it's better to move up to a later better weapon, or augment your forces with a complementary type of weapon that has different strategic uses.

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#15 Post by utilae »

I think it would be nice. You try to research/refine lasers. You pick improve damage. However, it fails, and research is side tracked into firerate improvement. This is like a bonus, maybe, but I would have a limit on the number of failures, eg 2. So the third time is a definate damage improvement.

But overall I think it would have to be done well. And it could get annoying. So it would have to be a rare case, unless your researchers are very bad at concentrating and keep researching random things that you didn't ask them to.

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