Infinite Technology Concept

[CaptainTofu]

Hello there!
Written as V0.4.5 stable is newest.

Here is the my concept for technology:

There are unique technologies and progressive ones.
o) Progressive technologies can be researched infinite times. They are progressively getting more expensive and therefore less cost-effective. Examples: Weapon Systems, Armor, Ship Types (and so on)
Example Armor:

• Titanium Armor I: 6 Structure, 100 Research
  (Factor: #2 Structure, +100% Research, Requirement: none)
  
  Titanium Armor II: 8 Structure, 200 Research
  Titanium Armor III: 10 Structure, 400 Research
  
  Crystalline Armor I: 6 Structure, 200 Research
  (Factor: +4 Structure, +100% Research, Requirement: Titanium Armor 2)
  
  Crystalline Armor I: 10 Structure, 400 Research
  And so on...

Along with this concept:
o) Ships should have a size you can set freely (Size10, Size15 or Kilotons or whatever). Also here: progressively more expansive and less cost-effective with the advantage of rarely being destroyed due to their hitpoints. And then you set a Type (robotic, classic, organic, ...)

-) The Type (Lets call it Testhull) has attributes like 0,2 external slots, 0,1 internal slots, 2 hitpoints (...), and that is multiplied with the size. Example:
Testhull Size 15 has 30 Hitpoints, 3 external slots, 1 internal slots

-) You can upgrade those modifiers by researching the new tiers of hulltypes. So Robotic-II is slightly better than Robotic-I, so you get more out of you ship size and its costs.

Unique technologies are things like being able to build outposts, being able to use kraken nests and so on. Once you enabled that, there is no point in researching it again, obvious that it is unique.
The advantage of this concept is, that it does not let you run out of technologies. And also it allows to be more creative with technology treeing by the player. As a developer you do not have to microdesign every single technology. You just design the first one and its modifier for further levels.

What do you think about that?

[Nexus]

I like this idea. Often I find myself with almost everything researched and a huge amount of research points going to waste.

Incremental technological improvements to things like ship weapons, defensive ground troops, and planet shields would be a good way to keep technological advance a factor even very late in a game.

The idea I had would be along these lines:

General Weapons Improvement level 1, adds 1 to weapons damage
Prerequirements would be level 4 of all the ship weapons types

General Weapons Improvements level 2, adds 1 to weapons damage
Prerequirements is GWI level 1, cost is double the previous one

and so on indefinitely

[Kassiopeija]

I like this concept very much, but one reason why, at a certain point, you can just plow swiftly through the whole techtree is that there's no correlative correspondence between the number of habitable planets/systems and the cost of technologies (=techspeed).
Other games offer techspeed-settings but this is often misused by non-experienced players setting it to fast and playing with a focus on research thus winning maps with technological advantages.
IMO technologies should automatically rise through a background mechanism that it tight to the number of potential habitable planets on the map.
Secondly, there needs to be mechanism of techcost-inflation meaning, every time a specific number of technologies got researched all other remaining techs get increased in cost by a small percentage, this takes care of factions which are intent to simply run away from the others technologically. Ofc all factions would be hit by this ultimately the same way, but it may cause a player to rather focus on the smaller techs and not jump over a "1k-cost wall" tech.

[labgnome]

I would suggest tying weapon improvement to weapon type. IE: Improved Mass Drivers, Improved Lasers, Improved Plasma Cannons and Improved Death Rays. The way research works, having more perpetually researchable technologies to use as a research-point sink would be better. Maybe having a tech like Cid Myer's Alpha Centauri's "Transcendent Thought" that did something like an incremental happiness boost to planets each time it was researched, but with an increasing cost each time you research it, so you always have a research sink, but you also get something out of it.

Slots and structure points are a bit iffy. I don't think being able to modify the base structure points is really relevant, as armor gets applied to structure. So a tech to improve existing armor should fulfill that function. Also specifically for organic hulls, I could see a tech that upped their growth ceilings, thus allowing them to get really big but only with age.

The biggest problem I see with this in regards to the current mechanics of the game is things like armor and weapons are mostly just different in value and not in kind. IE: lasers do more damage than mass drivers and plasma cannons do more damage than lasers and death rays do more damage than all of them, but they don't do so in any kind of different way. The same thing applies to the armor types.

I do like the idea of more flexibility in ship design, however I don't think that the addition of slots is something that should be considered carefully as balance is an important issue. The "N-dimensional" techs though might be good fits to apply to adding internal slots, especially as those seem to be becoming more relevant. One of my big concerns is not knowing much about the AI, how easy it would be to get the AI to grok what adding extra slots would mean for the different hulls, as one of the goals is to have the AI be as human-like in game behavior as possible. My other concern is that it might make a number of hulls essentially irrelevant, or other ridiculously powerful (making all the other hulls irrelevant) if you could just add slots. However conversely, having fewer, but more useful designs might be good if you had more design flexibility, as well as designs that stayed useful, or became more useful as the game progressed would also be nice for more fleet diversity.

Even technologies that wouldn't be perpetually researchable, having more techs that provided more incremental changes that were also growing research sinks as you progressed would be another way to sink all those late-game RP, at least for things that it wouldn't make sense to improve upon perpetually like population-based bonuses. IE: how is 200% of your planet doing this thing?