Starting Tech Levels
Posted: Sat Apr 02, 2005 7:21 pm
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.
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.