FreeOrion

This is a version of the tech tree intended to make the game as it stands now somewhat fun to play competitively. The numbers are most likely not very balanced, and if any interested parties have anyone else with whom to test the game, they can do some number tweaking of their own. All techs and buildings have research/build costs and times, and I have added several cross-category dependencies which were notably lacking from earlier versions. There are also a few places where more applications would be nice, but not necessary.

If I made any glaring oversights which greatly reduce this tree's usefulness in terms of future current and/or future playability, let me know and I will attempt to correct them. I also might make some changes to this version if there are more subtle inconsistencies with established design decisions.

NOTE: These content revisions will not work with the most recent official release. You can acquire a more recent build without having to compile the game yourself from here.

Edit: These are now the most recent text files which have been prepared for v.3.15, along with some extra placeholder meter icons for focus settings:

_________________
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

Fixed an error where the transformer building, when set to act as a Stargate, could only send ships, not receive them. Now when set to act as a Stargate, it should be able to act as either the source or the destination.

_________________
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

For some reason the Stargate Activator and Beacon get destroyed 1 turn after they have been built. They do seam to work, when a fleet arrives in just the right time though.

I think the RPs,PPs and research/built times are way too high as well.

I didn't research the Stargates by the way, I've just made them available using the preunlocked_items.txt.

This is deliberate. Since there is no way to activate the stargate via the UI, they need to be activated with separate buildings. If they stuck around, that would mess up all future attempts to send ships anywhere via stargate.

This is related to the idea of buildings being super rare and expensive. If every building was to go on every colony, like in MoO2, then yes, the build costs are absurdly high. However, buildings are rare. The decision to make one is important, and the effects of having such a building are significant. The build cost and time should be comparably significant. Also, I think you may be testing these buildings in a rather small empire? I recently played a test game in an 80 star galaxy, planet density on medium (using the previous version of the content files, not this one) and by the time I had populated most of the galaxy, my production and research per turn were well over 5000. Even with the maximum number of players, some of the larger empires are going to get to that level well before the end of the game in a 500 star galaxy. In order to keep late game buildings costly in the late game, build costs have to be very high.

Also, research costs for theories aren't much higher than a tech at a comparable level in MoO2. I think having these increased build costs and build times will end up enhancing playability in a multiplayer setting. Previously, I found that it was possible to research the entire tech tree far too quickly. Just doubling the research costs from one tech level to the next doesn't adequately represent the level of development which should be necessary for reaching the next tech level, IMO.

Stargates take a while to get to, because the ability to instantaneously move ships between two points enables very powerful strategies. I don't believe its a mistake to make them expensive in terms of build cost and research cost.

Thanks for commenting. You've probably noticed that a lot of the buildings are activated by specific focus settings, or by separate cheap buildings. There obviously needs to be a better way to do this, and some discussion on this topic is probably in order at some point.

_________________
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

Fixed another error where the Imperial Palace was having the effects of the Observatory, since I was using it as a test building.

_________________
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

but you can slow the production with more build-turns requirements, not only with build-cost. thus building which cost 1PP*1000turn will be build with approximately same speed in the early game and in near the end of game.

Consider though, that with low build costs, you can enqueue many at once without significantly decreasing overall available production. So eventually, you can end up with huge numbers of them anyway, as long as the overall build cost isn't very high.

Also, I believe that having a fairly high build or research time shouldn't happen very often. Unless it really has significance that improves the game strategically, it's just a pain for the player.

_________________
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

I've made a very slight change to the Psicorp description and short description that I thought I ought to post. It is based on Tortanick's suggestion here. There is no real need to download these for testing, but be aware that these are the latest versions of these files for the revised tech tree.

_________________
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

K, I've decided that it does take too long to develop with the increased costs of techs and buildings. However, instead of lowering them, I've added colony bases, which allow you to colonize another planet in the same system for less cost than a regular colony ship.

It destroys itself after one turn, to avoid issues with people using the cheaper colony base ship part on interstellar colony ships, or using the cheaper colony base hull for system defense.

This should speed up empire growth a bit, and the increased expansion should make the research costs more bearable. It may still end up being necessary to lower them however...

Edit: The text files that I had included with this post are now in the first post of this topic.

_________________
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

Shouldn't all these changes in content be commited?

For organizational purposes, the first post in this thread shall always contain the most recent set of content files. All of the other tech tree revision threads now have a link to this thread in the first post.

_________________
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

There is a bug report somewhat related to these rules: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=d ... tid=544942 .


Following should be more or less equivalent (a strict inequality is used for the upper bound):




Neither is straightforward, but the latter feels a bit clearer.

i've found some strange tech here:

What are you suggesting be changed, and what is it intended to fix? Right now, I have implemented a very odd workaround for that bug which, at the time I implemented it, would always have only one Imperial Palace active at once. It's not working as well right now, which is fine, because I'm not sure why it worked in the first place.... What you seem to be suggesting would make all Imperial Palaces non-functional if there is more than one, which might be confusing if the player doesn't realize what's going on.
Yeah, I changed it so that the gravity bonus/penalty is focus-dependant. Same with environment-farming.

_________________
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

I think he might be pointing out the ERROR text at the top.