Dev Diary #8 - The Situation Log and Special Projects

[King Ari]

So when you say "others will require research efforts within a particular field, such as physics, to complete. Technology research progress is diverted to the project at the expense of your current technology research in that field, temporarily halting all progress." Do you mean this is going to be another 4X Game where a Massive Interstellar Empire with Billions if not Trillions of citizens is completely incapable of performing even the slightest bit of multitasking? Will this stop progress across your Entire Empire or just for that single Ship?

Because if this is another game where researching even two things at the same time is physically impossible then I'm honestly kinda losing interest because that is a stupid game convention that really needs to die.

Someone mentioned the sliders in HOI3 which I quite liked the idea of/or something similar. But then you get the issue of bigger is always better which is no good

 

[Bolshevik_1924]

Space Hulks confirmed Boarding Actions confirmed all around good DD

Entire boarding party getting torn to pieces by ravenous monsters confirmed.

 

[aruon]

Entire boarding party getting torn to pieces by ravenous monsters confirmed.

"SG1! you need to investigate this ship and recover any beneficial technology... for mankind... or that asgard... or something."

once inside, then encounter

"...oh my"

they go wacko!

and then...

and that's why stargate your playthrough ended. trolololol, deadpool laughs at you.

sound about right Goosecreature?

 

[Bolshevik_1924]

That Richard Dean Anderson pic, brilliant.

But yeah that will sum it up nicely.

 

[Vishaing]

Someone mentioned the sliders in HOI3 which I quite liked the idea of/or something similar. But then you get the issue of bigger is always better which is no good

I assume you are referring to how it is always preferable to put all of your focus towards a single tech to unlock it as fast as possible and spreading your research out tends to reduce efficiency. It is true, this is a problem that pretty much every 4X Game with multiple research paths encounters.

Of course it is a 'problem' only because of these game's ridiculous insistence on abstracting the process and it would not apply at all if they instead made research more Realistic.

In Reality, Modern Research follows a very simple process; Background Study->Hypothesis->Experimentation->Review->Repeat. As Stellaris has named Scientist Characters incorporating a system that followed this would be very simple;

When you assign a Scientist to a tech, they start on Background Study. Each tick of time they study it they have a chance to come up with a Hypothesis, with the chance being dependent on how long they have been studying and their pre-existing skills. Once they have the Hypothesis, they begin Experimenting, which is where you may need to start shovelling Money into their Lab. Events can happen during this that wildly change the results. Once the experiment has concluded they Review it, and you gain, or possibly lose, progress towards the tech. Ideally 'techs' would be collections of independent Inventions, rather than a boring Progress Bar that eventually fills up and magically changes your military. Ideally Ideally there would also be a tech spread feature like in CK2.

The important thing is that the Hypothesis they test is decided when they get it, not once the experiment is done. This is not only more realistic but also gives the game a wonderful opportunity to toss in some ridiculous technobabble, something modern 4X Games seem to lack. More importantly, it automatically provides a way of balancing someone trying to 'Crash Research' a tech by pushing all their scientists onto it, because if you have two Scientists working on a Project, and they both get a Hypothesis at the same time, they might have both gotten The Same Hypothesis. Meaning at the end of the day, you get the tech of 1 Scientist for the Cost of 2.

On the other hand, it could be worthwhile on Multi-Disciplinary Projects, as Scientist 1 may get a Hypothesis related to Electrical Engineering while Scientist 2 got one related to Thrust Vectoring and thus together they both help design a new Engine. Especially if techs were composed of a set of independent inventions.

As always, the root of every problem in these types of games is a needless abstraction.

 

[ThatStrategyGuy]

Research in HOI3 is more along the lines of being able to research multiple technologies at once, every technology 'costing' one research point and you select all the technologies you want to research, some technologies being more difficult/more advanced therefore taking longer to research. but it has nothing to do with focusing all your research into one project.

 

[Axe99]

Cheers for the DD Goosecreature . These special projects sound great, and a situation log to help us stay on top of everything also sounds very good (particularly for larger empires). Keep on doing what you're doing .

 

[kreissig]

I assume you are referring to how it is always preferable to put all of your focus towards a single tech to unlock it as fast as possible and spreading your research out tends to reduce efficiency. It is true, this is a problem that pretty much every 4X Game with multiple research paths encounters.

Of course it is a 'problem' only because of these game's ridiculous insistence on abstracting the process and it would not apply at all if they instead made research more Realistic.

In Reality, Modern Research follows a very simple process; Background Study->Hypothesis->Experimentation->Review->Repeat. As Stellaris has named Scientist Characters incorporating a system that followed this would be very simple;

When you assign a Scientist to a tech, they start on Background Study. Each tick of time they study it they have a chance to come up with a Hypothesis, with the chance being dependent on how long they have been studying and their pre-existing skills. Once they have the Hypothesis, they begin Experimenting, which is where you may need to start shovelling Money into their Lab. Events can happen during this that wildly change the results. Once the experiment has concluded they Review it, and you gain, or possibly lose, progress towards the tech. Ideally 'techs' would be collections of independent Inventions, rather than a boring Progress Bar that eventually fills up and magically changes your military. Ideally Ideally there would also be a tech spread feature like in CK2.

The important thing is that the Hypothesis they test is decided when they get it, not once the experiment is done. This is not only more realistic but also gives the game a wonderful opportunity to toss in some ridiculous technobabble, something modern 4X Games seem to lack. More importantly, it automatically provides a way of balancing someone trying to 'Crash Research' a tech by pushing all their scientists onto it, because if you have two Scientists working on a Project, and they both get a Hypothesis at the same time, they might have both gotten The Same Hypothesis. Meaning at the end of the day, you get the tech of 1 Scientist for the Cost of 2.

On the other hand, it could be worthwhile on Multi-Disciplinary Projects, as Scientist 1 may get a Hypothesis related to Electrical Engineering while Scientist 2 got one related to Thrust Vectoring and thus together they both help design a new Engine. Especially if techs were composed of a set of independent inventions.

As always, the root of every problem in these types of games is a needless abstraction.

I like your idea here....unfortunately, I think the Dev's are going the way of abstraction. : (

 

[Safehold]

Technologies in 4x games were almost like a combination of skills, stats, and artifacts gained which leveled up heroes get. Every time you upgrade, you instantly get a raise in your abilities, except across your entire political control.

The abstraction comes from the various different research point obtained.

Ideally 'techs' would be collections of independent Inventions, rather than a boring Progress Bar that eventually fills up and magically changes your military. Ideally Ideally there would also be a tech spread feature like in CK2.

Things like the products of construction, new alloys like super aluminum and various steels, needed chemistry, a basic or foundation first. The periodic tables needed to be organized, which required an atomic model capable of supposing and verifying neutrons or protons.Once the theory is built up, testing for some new elements can become systematic rather than random. And then there are the "radiation" elements, which Marie Currie found, which can have dangerous effects, sometimes much longer in the future than in the near present.

Much of what science considers consensus and established, was considered magic in the past, such as electromagnetic field theories or invisible "radiation". The tools, techniques, and basic scientific theories didn't exist to explain how to test for such things. They knew that there was some kind of effect, like wind on a grass field, but pinpointing where the cause is required tools. And the tools required a basic understanding of what they were dealing with.

So back to the main point, abstracting research to a single resource and expending it like money, sounds good from a centralized planning pov of a bureaucrat, but that's not how it would work in an actual civilization. Once basic scientific theories were ironed out, using mathematical proofs for example, then applied technologies could be built using loads of money. There are also technologies which come from scientific theory, which wasn't as useful in the past, such as Tesla's inductive energy and transfer systems. Now a days people use it to charge their phones and what not. Once again, "invisible radiation" that was discovered quite awhile ago, near the same time as Edison, yet applications only came recently due to other techs. Copper wire was more useful to transferring existing power and electricity. Tesla's tech certainly worked, powerful broadcasting stations that could power light bulbs, but since it was hard to make it economical, people chose a different route. Same happened for nuclear reactors, thorium vs uranium.

Many scientific breakthroughs that came in conflict with existing theories, were suppressed or ignored. Until somebody found a way to make money from an application, then everyone started to pretend that they were always in on that bandwagon.

http://amasci.com/weird/vindac.html

Has a list. For engineer backgrounds, check out Ohms. Yeah, the one in the Ohm's Law equation. V=IR

They don't tell you things like that when you study and read up on the works of the masters before. Everybody thinks and pretends that all this basic theory and foundations in science came through and was picked up as normal, because of funding. A lot of these were independents or rebels, funded by almost nothing. It is perhaps counter intuitive, but the more popular something becomes, the more money it calls in, and thus the more interest is in maintaining the "status quo" rather than breaking it with some breakthrough discovery. Applied applications using existing principles in science is preferred in the money funded studies.

Alien Legacy used about 7 different scientific resources, so it required building a lot of infrastructure first before building all those resource using labs. A lot of the time they needed to be shut down, because there were no applications that needed funding or further research. Other times, some massive threat required building a lot of labs to work on the problem at once before the "solution" could be found, then it would require even more resource units and astronomy/biology/etc points.

In reply to Pdox going with research abstraction, they aren't doing that. Since research is by discoveries, a lot of tech will be gatewayed by access rather than resource. Traits of scientist, level of scientist, era locks, location locks, resource locks for certain of these Special Events. There seems to be a number of resource counters at the top of the new screenshots, but by creating different layers of systems for research, they can simulate different ways of getting breakthroughs in basic science. Most games treat special events as ways to boost research, such as GalCiv giving you extra points or another ship. By creating a layer, based around scientific traits for example, it makes the system a little bit more complicated and far less abstract, although perhaps still research point based.

Using research points as a kind of money, meaning it is fungible, is what makes abstract breaks in the simulated layers of research. Because it shouldn't be treated as fungible, meaning re usable across everything and almost every application. You store it up, spend it later, vs creating it only when you need to.

 

[Gnomecarl]

I assume you are referring to how it is always preferable to put all of your focus towards a single tech to unlock it as fast as possible and spreading your research out tends to reduce efficiency. It is true, this is a problem that pretty much every 4X Game with multiple research paths encounters.

Of course it is a 'problem' only because of these game's ridiculous insistence on abstracting the process and it would not apply at all if they instead made research more Realistic.

In Reality, Modern Research follows a very simple process; Background Study->Hypothesis->Experimentation->Review->Repeat. As Stellaris has named Scientist Characters incorporating a system that followed this would be very simple;

When you assign a Scientist to a tech, they start on Background Study. Each tick of time they study it they have a chance to come up with a Hypothesis, with the chance being dependent on how long they have been studying and their pre-existing skills. Once they have the Hypothesis, they begin Experimenting, which is where you may need to start shovelling Money into their Lab. Events can happen during this that wildly change the results. Once the experiment has concluded they Review it, and you gain, or possibly lose, progress towards the tech. Ideally 'techs' would be collections of independent Inventions, rather than a boring Progress Bar that eventually fills up and magically changes your military. Ideally Ideally there would also be a tech spread feature like in CK2.

The important thing is that the Hypothesis they test is decided when they get it, not once the experiment is done. This is not only more realistic but also gives the game a wonderful opportunity to toss in some ridiculous technobabble, something modern 4X Games seem to lack. More importantly, it automatically provides a way of balancing someone trying to 'Crash Research' a tech by pushing all their scientists onto it, because if you have two Scientists working on a Project, and they both get a Hypothesis at the same time, they might have both gotten The Same Hypothesis. Meaning at the end of the day, you get the tech of 1 Scientist for the Cost of 2.

On the other hand, it could be worthwhile on Multi-Disciplinary Projects, as Scientist 1 may get a Hypothesis related to Electrical Engineering while Scientist 2 got one related to Thrust Vectoring and thus together they both help design a new Engine. Especially if techs were composed of a set of independent inventions.

As always, the root of every problem in these types of games is a needless abstraction.

These are some good points. At least something between this and the current norm. As in Aurora 4x where you build an amount of research labs in a colony and you assign them to scientists, who based on skill level can manage different amounts of labs. That way you can have any number of projects going at the same time, as long as you have labs (and scientists) for them all. The time needed is decided by amount of labs dedicated and scientist skill and specialty.

I'm not advocating the overall complexity of Aurora for Stellaris, but I don't think this is the hardest concept to wrap your head around (or to implement). And it would lend more to realism than the typical "empire-wide tech research finished, please choose new tech".

 

[D Inqu]

Regarding "special projects". Please don't simplify it down to a "good"/"evil" choice like in the example in the OP. Realistic options too please. If (as in the example) a subterranean civilisation is digging, to me both "communicating" and "pre-emptively nuking" are extreme options neither of which feels sane. How about more choice like:
1. Prepare military facilities, but don't attack first
2. Launch a counter expedition to conquer the caverns
3. Create an exclusion some around the dig area.
...

 

[Safehold]

These are some good points. At least something between this and the current norm. As in Aurora 4x where you build an amount of research labs in a colony and you assign them to scientists, who based on skill level can manage different amounts of labs. That way you can have any number of projects going at the same time, as long as you have labs (and scientists) for them all. The time needed is decided by amount of labs dedicated and scientist skill and specialty.

I'm not advocating the overall complexity of Aurora for Stellaris, but I don't think this is the hardest concept to wrap your head around (or to implement). And it would lend more to realism than the typical "empire-wide tech research finished, please choose new tech".

Focus research and development using more scientists and money, via labs, would closely match the Manhattan Project. But ironically, the breakthroughs in scientific theory cannot be simulated in that fashion. ParaDox should probably use the anomalies and other freak accidents, to simulate that aspect of science. While applications go steadily up with more research, effort, and money, fundamental breakthroughs are trickier to predict. A lot of them are accidents.

 

[Gnomecarl]

Focus research and development using more scientists and money, via labs, would closely match the Manhattan Project. But ironically, the breakthroughs in scientific theory cannot be simulated in that fashion. ParaDox should probably use the anomalies and other freak accidents, to simulate that aspect of science. While applications go steadily up with more research, effort, and money, fundamental breakthroughs are trickier to predict. A lot of them are accidents.

That's true, I guess. Some avenues of research should be blocked until a specific event or event chain unlocks them. This could simulate the paradigm shifts of science.

That way, if that event doesn't trigger, you can't research that tech in that playthrough. Needless to say, events for essential tech should always be fired one way or another.

I think Paradox said something about "techs being lost forever" if a scientist failed his anomaly research. I also hope for some sort of having to choose between tech trees, not just choosing which tech I will focus on first and last, but actually excluding one by researching another.

 

[Safehold]

That's true, I guess. Some avenues of research should be blocked until a specific event or event chain unlocks them. This could simulate the paradigm shifts of science.

That way, if that event doesn't trigger, you can't research that tech in that playthrough. Needless to say, events for essential tech should always be fired one way or another.

I think Paradox said something about "techs being lost forever" if a scientist failed his anomaly research. I also hope for some sort of having to choose between tech trees, not just choosing which tech I will focus on first and last, but actually excluding one by researching another.

There won't be any tech trees if they are still going with the "deck of cards" for technology, the developer said in one case or another. So the deck "shuffles" and you may only research what you are allowed to or via random luck, so people scramble for the anomalies, not merely as real estate but because they need to get to them first. But if their scientific rpg level is low, they might die or something worse happens. This begins to feel closer to what the early phase/game might be.

An anomaly on a planet may be the only chance for you to get that particular tech at the end of a successful chain, unless you have a random or normal research card pulled out of the deck somehow. In that sense, you might lose access to that tech. Well, a lot of that depends on just how large their deck of cards and anomaly list will be.

 

[Gnomecarl]

There won't be any tech trees if they are still going with the "deck of cards" for technology, the developer said in one case or another. So the deck "shuffles" and you may only research what you are allowed to or via random luck, so people scramble for the anomalies, not merely as real estate but because they need to get to them first. But if their scientific rpg level is low, they might die or something worse happens. This begins to feel closer to what the early phase/game might be.

An anomaly on a planet may be the only chance for you to get that particular tech at the end of a successful chain, unless you have a random or normal research card pulled out of the deck somehow. In that sense, you might lose access to that tech. Well, a lot of that depends on just how large their deck of cards and anomaly list will be.

Oh, that would be great for randomization (which is good). I'm looking forward to a more in-depth DD on technology.

 

[kreissig]

Technologies in 4x games were almost like a combination of skills, stats, and artifacts gained which leveled up heroes get. Every time you upgrade, you instantly get a raise in your abilities, except across your entire political control.

The abstraction comes from the various different research point obtained.


Things like the products of construction, new alloys like super aluminum and various steels, needed chemistry, a basic or foundation first. The periodic tables needed to be organized, which required an atomic model capable of supposing and verifying neutrons or protons.Once the theory is built up, testing for some new elements can become systematic rather than random. And then there are the "radiation" elements, which Marie Currie found, which can have dangerous effects, sometimes much longer in the future than in the near present.

Much of what science considers consensus and established, was considered magic in the past, such as electromagnetic field theories or invisible "radiation". The tools, techniques, and basic scientific theories didn't exist to explain how to test for such things. They knew that there was some kind of effect, like wind on a grass field, but pinpointing where the cause is required tools. And the tools required a basic understanding of what they were dealing with.

So back to the main point, abstracting research to a single resource and expending it like money, sounds good from a centralized planning pov of a bureaucrat, but that's not how it would work in an actual civilization. Once basic scientific theories were ironed out, using mathematical proofs for example, then applied technologies could be built using loads of money. There are also technologies which come from scientific theory, which wasn't as useful in the past, such as Tesla's inductive energy and transfer systems. Now a days people use it to charge their phones and what not. Once again, "invisible radiation" that was discovered quite awhile ago, near the same time as Edison, yet applications only came recently due to other techs. Copper wire was more useful to transferring existing power and electricity. Tesla's tech certainly worked, powerful broadcasting stations that could power light bulbs, but since it was hard to make it economical, people chose a different route. Same happened for nuclear reactors, thorium vs uranium.

Many scientific breakthroughs that came in conflict with existing theories, were suppressed or ignored. Until somebody found a way to make money from an application, then everyone started to pretend that they were always in on that bandwagon.

http://amasci.com/weird/vindac.html

Has a list. For engineer backgrounds, check out Ohms. Yeah, the one in the Ohm's Law equation. V=IR

They don't tell you things like that when you study and read up on the works of the masters before. Everybody thinks and pretends that all this basic theory and foundations in science came through and was picked up as normal, because of funding. A lot of these were independents or rebels, funded by almost nothing. It is perhaps counter intuitive, but the more popular something becomes, the more money it calls in, and thus the more interest is in maintaining the "status quo" rather than breaking it with some breakthrough discovery. Applied applications using existing principles in science is preferred in the money funded studies.

Alien Legacy used about 7 different scientific resources, so it required building a lot of infrastructure first before building all those resource using labs. A lot of the time they needed to be shut down, because there were no applications that needed funding or further research. Other times, some massive threat required building a lot of labs to work on the problem at once before the "solution" could be found, then it would require even more resource units and astronomy/biology/etc points.

In reply to Pdox going with research abstraction, they aren't doing that. Since research is by discoveries, a lot of tech will be gatewayed by access rather than resource. Traits of scientist, level of scientist, era locks, location locks, resource locks for certain of these Special Events. There seems to be a number of resource counters at the top of the new screenshots, but by creating different layers of systems for research, they can simulate different ways of getting breakthroughs in basic science. Most games treat special events as ways to boost research, such as GalCiv giving you extra points or another ship. By creating a layer, based around scientific traits for example, it makes the system a little bit more complicated and far less abstract, although perhaps still research point based.

Using research points as a kind of money, meaning it is fungible, is what makes abstract breaks in the simulated layers of research. Because it shouldn't be treated as fungible, meaning re usable across everything and almost every application. You store it up, spend it later, vs creating it only when you need to.

Good points. Although you mention that techs will be "gatewayed", the basic system is still more abstracted than what Vishaing described above. Mostly due to the point of his complaint/observation about a special research project requiring a physics focus - It stops other research according to DD #8.

 

[HeartsofMetal]

"SG1! you need to investigate this ship and recover any beneficial technology... for mankind... or that asgard... or something."

once inside, then encounter

"...oh my"

they go wacko!

and then...

and that's why stargate your playthrough ended. trolololol, deadpool laughs at you.

sound about right Goosecreature?

Space Marines will purge that heresy from this ship!

 

[beckermt]

Regarding "special projects". Please don't simplify it down to a "good"/"evil" choice like in the example in the OP. Realistic options too please. If (as in the example) a subterranean civilisation is digging, to me both "communicating" and "pre-emptively nuking" are extreme options neither of which feels sane. How about more choice like:
1. Prepare military facilities, but don't attack first
2. Launch a counter expedition to conquer the caverns
3. Create an exclusion some around the dig area.
...

While the idea here is good, I think you also need to consider how those options differ from each other. Options 1 and 3 you listed are basically "prepare, but don't attack."

Option 2 is just another interpretation of either diplomacy or attack. It sounds more like attack.

Regardless, a third option (defensive, preparedness) would make sense here, but overcluttering the interface with very minorly different options is not good.

 

[misterbean]

While the idea here is good, I think you also need to consider how those options differ from each other. Options 1 and 3 you listed are basically "prepare, but don't attack."

Option 2 is just another interpretation of either diplomacy or attack. It sounds more like attack.

Regardless, a third option (defensive, preparedness) would make sense here, but overcluttering the interface with very minorly different options is not good.

I agree. The most obvious choices would be defense, offense or diplomacy.

 

[Safehold]

Space Marines will purge that heresy from this ship!

That's not a heresy, that's a roach motel. Please enter, but do not expect to come out.