Starting Tech Levels

For what's not in 'Top Priority Game Design'. Post your ideas, visions, suggestions for the game, rules, modifications, etc.

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Hazies
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Starting Tech Levels

#1 Post by Hazies »

I kind of thought of this while playing Age of Empires a while ago, but in the MoO games there are 50 tech levels. Each tech level shows how advanced your civilization is and what they know already.

What would be interesting is if one could start the game with everyone at, say, tech level 20 intead of tech level one. Or if there were preset starting technology levels. For instance, in my above example Age of Empires, you had the choice of starting the game at:

The Dark Age: No techs researched
The Feudal Age
The Castle Age
The Imperial Age
The Post-Imperial Age: All techs researched

Although the MoO games had and still have quite a large appeal, I believe that some of it is lost on the fact that one has to build up everything on every single game (which is good for full strategic depth). However, I think every now and then: why shouldn't I just be able to start with a high level of technology and get to the action?

The main disadvantage is that the higher you start, the less advantage there is in the technology tree. Perhaps a way that this could be avoided is to give the tech-savvy races an advantage somehow, perhaps based off of formulae:

Tech-Savvy Race: x
Average Race: (x/5)*4
Non-Savvy Race: (x/3)*2

Where x is the level preset selected (an "Age" of some kind), and the result of the fomula is the starting tech level for that race.
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Dreamer
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#2 Post by Dreamer »

If I recall correctly at least Moo2 have this option indeed. You choosed between "pre-warp" "modern" and "advanced" or something like that. Anyway I alwais start at pre warp since I can choose tecnologies better and get an advantage.

A way to solve this: initial research/production point before the first turn, so you can choose wich tecnologies you wold have discovered if you could choose. Planet status at game start should reflect the order of thech advance and assume that the tecnology was in use for some turns. Kind of a "simulated colony growth".

Kharagh
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#3 Post by Kharagh »

Such an option would be nice if it is not too hard to implement into the game. It would practically be the AI playing with you making all tech decisions.

Daveybaby
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#4 Post by Daveybaby »

The moo3 option of letting the game play itself for a user defined number of turns was pretty nice. Of course you run the risk of the AI handing you a complete disaster of an empire, but sometimes digging yourself out of that kind of hole is half the fun (well, it would have been if it was possible to have any kind of fun playing moo3).
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Kharagh
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#5 Post by Kharagh »

lol, not an hour after installing moo3 for the first time, my friends and me were playing moo2 over LAN again, athough the turns took ages to be processed.
Moo3 was the greatest disappointment I have ever had in any computer game.

Sejant Chimera
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#6 Post by Sejant Chimera »

Daveybaby wrote:The moo3 option of letting the game play itself for a user defined number of turns was pretty nice. Of course you run the risk of the AI handing you a complete disaster of an empire, but sometimes digging yourself out of that kind of hole is half the fun (well, it would have been if it was possible to have any kind of fun playing moo3).
I know that this might be a long way off, but some 'historical' scenarios (as in Medieval:Total War) where there is an extensive backstory would be good.

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