Flatfingers wrote:

light487 wrote:What I would really have liked to see is that certain tech research requiring certain materials, minerals and other things found within the game. ... My point is that it shouldn't really just be as simple as clicking a button and waiting for a certain time for discoveries to be made. It should require some level of resource supply as well.

I could support this as long as it applied to what I called "object" techs, and not "concept" techs.

It sort of makes sense that you'd need uranium to figure out the applied technology of Fission Reactor, or antimatter to discover the tech to build Jump Drives, etc. In fact, needing specialized resources to complete an object tech discovery could create a nice interaction with physical exploration and with strategic level play such as fleet operations, economic development, and high-level diplomacy. If you define key research materials as resource nodes -- planets or really big, unique asteroids -- then you need to apply all your faction's power toward securing worlds with the resources you need for the new technologies you want to research.

This would complicate Josh's nice, clean, simple research mechanic. It would also mean needing to make sure the universe generation algorithm didn't hose the player by putting all the useful resource nodes in the territory of your worst enemy.

But maybe the payoff of integrating research more deeply into multiple areas of strategic play makes the idea of needing resources for applied research worth considering.

IN general I love the idea of having a physical part in the theoretical research system, just so it feels more like the player has an impact to drive his "scientists" into the right direction and not just tell them to research the general field of propulsion.

I would love to see a stargatey approach, meaning SG1 finds Tritanium, they bring a rock sample home, now scientists, can "click" the found objects node and begin research, I am pretty sure it could be integrated as part of the reverse-engineering ideas.

So we get the analysis of the sampe back, with all it's randomised stats and see it has a +1 integrity -1 mass. Meaning more hull points and maybe more maneuvrabilty, so maybe from there a branch could apply to to hull reasearch, or weaponized research.

Well obviously it would now require to search and set up mines for this particular element, meaning you have another thing to drive you in the verse, letting you either build up your own mining corp, or hiring mining ships^^

BTW @Josh I loooooooved your uber big Dev-log! Nothing better to read than that, even better than my Prof's research papers! (dont let him hear that... )
So if you have energy and want to write a lot, feel free !

And of course thanks all for reading,
-Komurin

JoshParnell wrote:I won't do a full, in-depth response at the moment, but just quickly touch on the subject of specialist vs. generalist, which I suppose I worded poorly in my log.
-snip-
Just makes sense!

This! I prefer the way research works the way Josh outlined it. It reflects the sacrifices we have to deal with every day in Real Life. Do you go the general way and lose all ability to be really good in something or do you specialize in something, risking that your opponent might have something up their sleeve to counter what you specialize in. And whether you research 10 main branches with 1 level in each branch or 2 branches with 5 levels in each branch you have done the same amount of research and time spent. I can't complain there either, it's my choice how I choose to research.

TanC wrote:Do you go the general way and lose all ability to be really good in something or do you specialize in something, risking that your opponent might have something up their sleeve to counter what you specialize in.

I'm sorry if this has come up in other threads, but I checked this one and didn't find the answer to the question if the AI has the same research options available as the player. In other words: if the AI does have all research options, then what will prevent the other AI players from evolving alongside you, leading to ever more powerful enemies/traders/whatever? This would - in my limited understanding - make for the same leveling mechanism as in Oblivion, where the enemy AI was directly linked to your own level.

Ixos wrote:Isn't it still true that you will have diminishing returns the deeper you go into each branch of specialiation?

The way I understand it (or propose =) is that vertical scaling is not impossible.
It's just not a thing you can "order" for a specific tech, setting it's research on autopilot until you have the überitem.

If you keep hammering away at a particular tech, you may end up with a direct upgrade. A small one but anyway.
Then you take that tech as a base and keep at it.
Again you'll get several variants of that one and one of them may be an upgrade "by item score".
But it may not be going in the direction you want so maybe you go back one node and try again from there. Or try your luck in the new direction. We require more research modules. =)

A different bit I've been toying with:

How could "Mastery" in a node aid you?
Does the automatic result bias have to directly affect the item stats?



Alternative 1: Take your pick

The deeper you delve into a tech tree, the higher your "mastery" of that tech.

When a new item/node pops up,
your mastery score in that tech increases the chance that you won't just get the research result but get an offer of 2 or more to choose from.

That way you have far less need for an automatic bias.
And while the player still isn't in control of what pops up, he gets to feel more important when he gets asked. =)



Alter... err... I just had it. It'll come back to me when it's ready. =)

Ixos wrote:

JoshParnell wrote:In LT the progression looks a lot more exponential and a lot less linear (because it's a real "tree" of tech progression, not just a few linear chains). So being a generalist will mean a lot of time spent in the shallow nodes. That's not a penalty, it's life!

Isn't it still true that you will have diminishing returns the deeper you go into each branch of specialiation?

This should according to my logic mean a generalist can pick up more of the "easy" shallow bonuses across the board and gain a higher total %modifier boost but spread thin across all areas instead.

In my eyes it's a very fair trade off and balanced system

That sounds similar to how EVE Online's skill development works. Skill levels from 1 to 5, 1 being easy, 2, 3, 4 and 5 becoming exponentially more difficult. I was playing the game for long enough to get familiar with the system, and a smattering of related skills at level 3 would indeed give you a greater overall advantage than training one of them to level 5.

Flatfingers wrote:Now please explain to me how to be sufficiently random that an algorithm looking for patterns doesn't see any.

I doubt it would be an algorithm looking for patterns, just a massaging of the odds based on relative weighting of the tech types you've chosen to iterate on previously. If I repeatedly choose to iterate on research nodes that have yielded "heavy" variants of ships, research-o-tron gets the idea that I rather like these heavy variants and so it tweaks the odds so that I'm just a tiny bit more likely to get something similar again.

I doubt Josh would be silly enough to give this system a hair trigger, so you'll have to really deliberately and repeatedly push in one specific direction to significantly skew the odds in favour of discovering that kind of tech over any other.

Oh look, a ghost!

Zero Gravitas wrote:I doubt it would be an algorithm looking for patterns, just a massaging of the odds based on relative weighting of the tech types you've chosen to iterate on previously. If I repeatedly choose to iterate on research nodes that have yielded "heavy" variants of ships, research-o-tron gets the idea that I rather like these heavy variants and so it tweaks the odds so that I'm just a tiny bit more likely to get something similar again.

It can be a really simple algorithm and still hit the mark.
The Research-O-Tron doesn't have to be an heuristic neural net [insert more buzzwords] AI.

For all techs / items within a category... that you continued to research from...
get an average for each stat.
This is all you need to know about what the player considered useful.

How exactly that influences new research is a matter of balance.
For instance, the severity of the bias could increase with the absolute number of items that went into the average.


BTW:
An automated bias does not mean specialisation on one or several stats!
If you want to be a jack of all trades and research stuff all over the place, the average... averages out... so further research is biased towards average / balanced stats.
"JOAT players" are not punished at all. In fact, they get even jackier and get more multi-role equipment!

A generalist player may get the wrong message from an automatic bias if looking at it on the wrong scale. On a larger scale, diversified research is "a thing", too, just like concentrating your research on "heavy items".

Gazz wrote:If you want to be a jack of all trades and research stuff all over the place, the average... averages out...

Exactly.

Flatfingers wrote:

light487 wrote:What I would really have liked to see is that certain tech research requiring certain materials, minerals and other things found within the game. ... My point is that it shouldn't really just be as simple as clicking a button and waiting for a certain time for discoveries to be made. It should require some level of resource supply as well.

I could support this as long as it applied to what I called "object" techs, and not "concept" techs.

It sort of makes sense that you'd need uranium to figure out the applied technology of Fission Reactor, or antimatter to discover the tech to build Jump Drives, etc. In fact, needing specialized resources to complete an object tech discovery could create a nice interaction with physical exploration and with strategic level play such as fleet operations, economic development, and high-level diplomacy. If you define key research materials as resource nodes -- planets or really big, unique asteroids -- then you need to apply all your faction's power toward securing worlds with the resources you need for the new technologies you want to research.

This would complicate Josh's nice, clean, simple research mechanic. It would also mean needing to make sure the universe generation algorithm didn't hose the player by putting all the useful resource nodes in the territory of your worst enemy.

But maybe the payoff of integrating research more deeply into multiple areas of strategic play makes the idea of needing resources for applied research worth considering.

There's a saying that goes something along the lines of "necessity is the mother of all invention.".. And essentially this is what would happen in the game anyway. When you start out in some randomly generated place, that place might have an abundance of such-and-such materials.. so your "object" research would go in a particular direction based on that, to begin with.. Starting areas shouldn't just be about what a place looks like and what faction is here or there, it should also be to do with things like technology and research. The history of the place is based on what resources are available to it as much as the social structures that encapsulate it. Maybe there is a big war going on simply because the arch-enemy factions have the very thing that the other faction needs to progress in their research/evolution.. maybe there are negotiations (anti-war) for the same reason..

Your game play experience is going to be affected by so many things and resource availability is one of them that should count. When you play 4x games, there are a bunch of established factions usually.. they all have different technologies that focus on different things.. how did they arrive at those points in their evolution if every part of the galaxy has an evenly distributed amount of resources. Sure there is some element of different species thinking about solutions to problems in different ways (e.g. one species might tackle the problem of faster-than-light in a completely different way to another species) but the answers to those problems aren't always just theoretical but also to do with what resources are available. If there was a material that could make it easy to travel FTL (with applied research into it) but it was so rare and impossible to synthesise, then that wouldn't be a solution for that species.. but in another corner of the galaxy, it might be quite abundant and so that other species uses it to achieve the solution instead and so on.

Anyway, I think that it not only could lead to the player needing to explore more but also can be used to generate the factional histories and regional histories and established technology etc and further could setup the procedural story-of-life that unfolds around you as you play.

JoshParnell wrote:...
There's really very little that's "gamey" about this system, and that's part of why I like it so much - it feels very reflective of reality. If you choose to study many fields, it is true that your energy will be spread among them, as opposed to focusing on a single field. Simple math And as for the research bias, it makes total sense - I'm spent my life studying graphics programming, so it's much more likely that I'll have a great idea related to graphics today than...that I'll have a great idea related to biochemistry Just makes sense!

Well, if we speak of reality - once you do have a faction / enough money you will get more or less at the top of the tech chain in every fields.
I am leading a R&D team in RL and we are chemical engineers. We are cutting edge in this field, but not backwards in software or in the cars we drive. Partly the company is big enough to have top softies, partly we buy the tech (cars).
So on a realistic base, while specialization is the way to go to be the best, it is only valid when you are all alone:
- as soon as you are two, each being a specialist, you cross fertilize and find synergies that push the cutting edge in both fields (or may create whole new fields)
- as soon as they are other faction/companies/guys you can buy what you don't develop yourself for a fraction of the costs.

And speaking of reality. We are good . We aren't cheap . Science is mighty expensive. It is order of magnitudes more expensive to develop a new technology than to buy its realization - e.g. developing a new warp drive is likely more expensive than buying thousands of ships with said drive. It usually only pay back if you mass market the tech (or have somebody doing it for you under license).
Even weapons in RL are sold to foreign armies... And I don't' know of any army specializing only in defense agains tanks or troop transport or nuclear warheads.

Well, I guess I am not helping here, with no proposition nor solutions.... I guess my message is just that research may be a valid end-of-game feature when controlling civilizations (otherwise you don't have the means to R&D for your own single use), and then specialization becomes a funny expression when you can have many specialist working on different fields at the same time.


On the other hand, this is a game, so who cares about realistic (we are flying from star to star, aren't we?) as long as it's fun....

My main problem with specialization is that you might come across a faction that's the complete symmetric opposite. If you encounter this faction, you need to be able to adjust and adapt. You need to evolve, and you need to be able to do it relatively quick. You might not have the time to take your research in a different direction and teach the biassed system to favour other properties.

A couple of possibilities come to mind for the "respond quickly" situation. They're naïve and common, but they're a starting point.

1. Set a maximum percentage of discovered techs that can be applied at any one time. This isn't much help in the early research game, but [once you've discovered a bunch of techs] would let you switch quickly from one set of specialized techs to another.

2. "Crash research program" immediately gives you 3-6 modifier techs for a selected fixed tech, but at a substantial cost to some other asset (money, other research, popularity, etc.).

Katorone wrote:My main problem with specialization is that you might come across a faction that's the complete symmetric opposite. If you encounter this faction, you need to be able to adjust and adapt. You need to evolve, and you need to be able to do it relatively quick. You might not have the time to take your research in a different direction and teach the biassed system to favour other properties.

Just to play devil's advocate here but why should you be able to defeat/adapt to every possibility? It's a big universe out there and at some point you will find these "symmetric opposites" but that is a good thing as it means there is a limiter to your expansion as a faction.. your environment is shaped by the other environments around you and so on.

Say you were a river of water.. limestone can be eroded and you can eventually push through.. but there are some materials that you can't erode away in any realistic time frame, so the path of the river is altered around that material and life goes on, with the material ever present on the edges of your watery environment but you continually go around and beyond it. You can still continue on in your journey towards the ocean (or lowest point of the land) but you just can't go "that" way.

light487 wrote: Say you were a river of water.. limestone can be eroded and you can eventually push through.. but there are some materials that you can't erode away in any realistic time frame, so the path of the river is altered around that material and life goes on, with the material ever present on the edges of your watery environment but you continually go around and beyond it. You can still continue on in your journey towards the ocean (or lowest point of the land) but you just can't go "that" way.

That's the point where brute force comes in. Or the river finding the technology to turn itself into lava instead.
I'm perfectly fine with getting hard opponents that have high defences against my weapons and high damage against my defences. But, then I do want to be able to adapt to this situation in a reasonable way.

I'd even go further. I'm perfectly fine with the AI researching weapons that abuse my weak spots.