Possible issue with critical techs being missed by Researchers

[KingHalford]

Hopefully you can see from this small jpg but in this game, I've managed to discover Nuclear Power Plant before I ever got either Solar Power or Power Plant. Maybe one of those should be a prerequisite for discovering Nuclear Power?

More generally and perhaps more importantly, this might highlight an issue with the way discoveries work. This particular game was on an Earthlike planet where farming was possible and I managed to find power plants around. I've had this issue on planets with little water and no atmosphere: if the Economic Council kept skipping forwards through the research tree like this and missing Power Plant and Solar Power, that's gonna end your game very quickly as your seriously hampered by lack of power, water and food.

Vic is there anything in place to prevent this kind of thing happening? Whilst I love random tech trees (if correctly implemented) there may need to be some kind of rubber-banding of certain critical techs, or perhaps extra weight given to important early game technologies over the later tiers, to prevent missing them out and charging ahead to discover half the tech tree further down without them? Or am I missing something here and doing something wrong?

[KingHalford]

After some deliberation, I am starting to wonder if this is such an issue as I originally thought it was?

In my current game, where that screenshot comes from, I've hit a point now where I've had to mothball industry in order to keep my energy consumption down. I either need one of those powerstation technologies, or I need to invade someone to take their power stations myself. I could either throw EVERYTHING into Economy tech discovery/research for a while, or change my regime profile in order to facilitate tech trading or better economic growth.

I have a very strong neighbour, with a large army, and he's hostile. Whatever I do, I need to do it quickly!

Honestly, this is the kind of stuff that I really love about strategy gaming, it's not often 4x games have the depth to allow such a variety of options. It might be the case that my initial concern about how tech research works here was misplaced: that "oversight" by my Economic Council might well be helping to facilitate this set of difficult decisions I now need to make in order to progress.

At this point in my gaming career, I'm less interested in being able to win the game every single time as I am about coming up against really interesting, difficult game-critical choices. In that respect, I'm actually very impressed with this game already.

[devoncop]

Interestingly in Tortouga Power's playthrough on You Tube he also ran into power problems as his economic Council steadfastly refused to discover Energy Tech and forced him into a similar set of less than perfect choices.

I am with you......I actually don't mind this happening as you have to adapt. In his case he shifted from Bio Dome to outdoor farming and thus reduced his power consumption as well as putting his factories on 75% or 50% capacity.

Great flexiblity

[KingHalford]

Right! I can see some people hating that, but this kind of randomised gameplay is exactly what prevents people just finding the optimal playstyle and winning easily every time (and then claiming the game is boring).

There is a fine line though, between that kind of thing being fun, and it being frustrating. Providing there are options, with some way to fix the issue you have, then it's all good. If you've just played 30 hours of a long campaign and you hit some problem caused by a random event and that can't be fixed, that's a problem.

One issue I see here, and it's something I plan for in my games now, is that it's gonna be optimal play to go for the Economic Council right from the start, and to heavily invest in discovery each time. I've mixed feelings about that: whilst I understand that it's not always possible, my very favourite games don't have such a "standard and necessary" trajectory through the tech tree. I think there should be room for occasions where you might need to take something like Military Research first instead of Economic (and I concede that this early into development and testing, it's likely this is the case and we've just not come across it yet!)

[KingHalford]

How's about the possibility of allowing the player the choice when to jump down and open up the next branch of research? So, instead of the next branches automatically opening up once you've hit three technologies, instead you get an option to open it up immediately, or to wait until a further tech is researched in the original branch to give you another chance to hit a critical tech you need for your particular planet type, before you're increasing the total number of potential discoveries and decreasing further your chance to find the tech you desperately need.

Assuming that the initial "problem" I identified does turn into an issue for people, perhaps this might be one way to address it.

All that speculation aside, I'm still not convinced it's actually necessary at this early stage, for the gameplay/fun reasons I stated above.

[devoncop]

I agree re the Economic Council inevitability issue at the start followed by the Military Council....difficult to know how this can be resolved without either letting the Economic Council already be in place at game start (which then pushes the same issue onto the Military Council) or have characters influence player choice and have the initial Leaders stats affect the desirability of the EC/MC choice....

For example if RNG pulled up a disproportionate number of Military incumbents and a pro-Military faction in dominant position in the government then penalties if the player prioritises the EC over the MC first could be much greater which may make the decision less of a no-brainer....

[StarDreamer]

Would one way be to fix this issue be that you could focus discovery to an area, but that it would be at a significant penalty to the BP cost, say a 50% or 100% increase to BP cost of discovery(the exact number this would be should most likely be tested, so that it isn't really exploitable). You could say it would simulate the top heavy directing of research to some specific field at the cost of other discoveries.

[KingHalford]

Right, that's how it works in Remnants of the Precursors: if you spread your research out, you get a bonus to overall research output, but focusing you get less.

I'm always extremely careful suggesting "fixes" for games, particularly ones I've not played much!

I can already see a situation where I'd take Military first: if I was dead set on a fast start I'd rush for Howitzers and Artillery so I could take another Zone very quickly.