[beckermt]

I really love the (metaphorical) "card" idea. It gives players meaningful choices, keeps the game fresh and gives the dev team a lot of levers behind the scenes to balance things invisibly.

I'm not a huge fan of "build more research labs" as a way to model investment in technology, though. The trope of "devote real estate to building labs" for technology is kind of silly and not engaging. It would be way more interesting if the way to advance your research was by doing interesting things, like "building a lab around a black hole gives you a much high chance of getting rare gravitonics tech", "implementing a very free market economy randomly grants you minor tech improvements and innovations", "ship designs more specialized than the basic types are only gettable if you do a lot of the thing the ship is specialized for" (like combat, exploration, etc.)".

Most of the stuff you listed as "interesting things" are in the game. Anomaly research, for example. How they affect gravitonics research isn't clear, but it's possible that research station near an anomaly (e.g. a black hole of note) would give you an increased chance to choose a specific tech to research.

 

[grekulf]

People will want to know and will find out somehow (probably game files). I think this will just end up being frustrating. I'd strongly advocate for displaying information like this to the player. Hidden systems, especially of that magnitude, are bound to cause annoyance.

Well, exploring how the tech system works behind the scenes is probably a part of what a lot of our player base would see as fun. Exposing it would be very difficult, and not be worth the effort.

 

[beckermt]

IDK, I cant think of any games where I liked deliberately un-transparent mechanics.

If you knew the mechanics, you'd just be optimizing every annoying little thing to get that specific tech. It's like trying to force events in EU4. Not exactly the most fun part of the game.

 

[keynes2.0]

If you knew the mechanics, you'd just be optimizing every annoying little thing to get that specific tech. It's like trying to force events in EU4. Not exactly the most fun part of the game.

Hiding mechanics doesn't stop people from being min-maxers. Making the game interesting if you dont min-max stops people from being min-maxers. Or sometimes they do min-max and that is fine too, just so long as you dont need to.

I just dont get EUIV players...

 

[Korashy]

Well, exploring how the tech system works behind the scenes is probably a part of what a lot of our player base would see as fun. Exposing it would be very difficult, and not be worth the effort.

I feel like the target audience of games like this, and paradox in general are the numbers nerds who will go out of their way for a 5% modifier, and who very much like to know everything that goes on under the hood. I mean people read through EUIV decision and event files all the time and in Vicky2 some users spent an incredible amount of time to fully understand how the economy model works.

 

[bertxav]

It’s Monday and you all know what that means!

It's time for another episode of Fan Monday?

 

[beckermt]

Hiding mechanics doesn't stop people from being min-maxers. Making the game interesting if you dont min-max stops people from being min-maxers. Or sometimes they do min-max and that is fine too, just so long as you dont need to.

I just dont get EUIV players...

I will never put in the effort to find out how the techs are weighted. However, if the information was easily available, I would agonize over it constantly and be annoyed at non-efficient outcomes. You may think I'm silly, but that's how I'm wired, and I expect that this isn't unique to me.

 

[EntropyAvatar]

What are the other ways to obtain a tech other than regular research? Is there tech trading, tech stealing, tech by conquest? Does a tech become easier to research if you are trading all the time with empires that have it?

 

[CptWilly]

I feel like the target audience of games like this, and paradox in general are the numbers nerds who will go out of their way for a 5% modifier, and who very much like to know everything that goes on under the hood. I mean people read through EUIV decision and event files all the time and in Vicky2 some users spent an incredible amount of time to fully understand how the economy model works.

I don't think the goal is to prevent players who want to from doing exactly that, but to keep the interface clean without throwing everything that goes into the chance of a tech appearing into a tool tip right there in game.

 

[costevie]

I'm happy to see a "290 month" time frame for one of the current research categories in the first screenshot. A pet peeve of 4x games for me is how fast things seem to occur - going from sub-light travel to multi colony empire in two generations (I'm looking at you, GalCiv) is totally immersion breaking for me and I'm glad Paradox isn't afraid to stretch this game out a bit.

 

[EntropyAvatar]

I'm happy to see a "290 month" time frame for one of the current research categories in the first screenshot. A pet peeve of 4x games for me is how fast things seem to occur - going from sub-light travel to multi colony empire in two generations (I'm looking at you, GalCiv) is totally immersion breaking for me and I'm glad Paradox isn't afraid to stretch this game out a bit.

It's only 290 months because it's the start of the game so the research-per-month is small. Picking a tech like that at the start of the game is going to seriously ham-string you.

 

[TacticalRetreat]

Goddammit these screenshots look so great. I just know I'm going to sink another 500 hours of my life into this game, minimum.

 

[Kuschelflummi]

Hmm... it does sound really interesting. I too hope, there are techs exclusive for some phenotypes. Or some techs wired to your homeworld... like Spice Melange on a Desert Planet :3

 

[ponasozis]

Will there be techs that would be mutually exclusive to each other
like going biological path of a tech or a electronic path of a tech
that would give more unique to races
like one race would go down the biological path have these half tentacle looking ships
while others would go like a more standard futuristic ships
and etc

 

[King Ari]

+1

 

[Meraun]

You fight them.

i like that. i mean, how else woud you find it out. I guess you can use spies as well.

Remove all Signs form your ships, paint them black and ambus a single ship. And hope it wont be too strong

 

[BiBolino]

Cant wait to get my hands on this

 

[MAHak]

Are there any 'bottle-neck' researches that you have to research for the game to advance, from a certain point?
Like you can't engage in diplomacy until you have randomly been given the chance to research "Alien Langauge Translation".

Like in Vicky 1 where you have to research "mechanical parts" (can't remeber the name of the tech atm.) in order to build machine parts factories, otherwise you have to import machine parts.
Or you can't colonize certain areas until you have researched "Medicine, Machine Guns and Imperialism"

 

[wolfing]

I think I'm going to mod research speed/cost, so at the end of the game you don't have all or most of the technologies.

 

[fabius]

Must say I love the sound of the tech system. It should give some variety and uncertainties. And some tough choices !!

That said I do think the wikki and stuff will see players sort of sketch out what's possible.