Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

I finally got tired of flipping thru mulitple data files while trying to figure out what characteristics a baseship has, when do I get Monolith IIIs, what level of Intell project is Puppet Parties, what all do you get after researching a particular field to a specific level, what exactly to Mineral Scanners do?

So I put what little excell spreadsheet skills I had (very little) to use and created the attached file. It is a rather simple creation but I have found it to be rather useful and informative. I thought I would post it here and hope someone else finds it usefull also. If anyone has any comments, suggestions or critiques feel free to let me know.


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Character is best defined as that which you do when you believe nobody is watching.

[This message has been edited by WhiteHojo (edited 10 February 2001).]

[This message has been edited by WhiteHojo (edited 10 February 2001).]

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

Many thanks, will you update it after the next patch?

tic

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

I plan on it... hopefully

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Character is best defined as that which you do when you believe nobody is watching.

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

Very helpful, thanks!

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-Don

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

Thank you very much. I have a lot more excel skills, and look forward to opening the zip. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif Thanks again. Great work. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

I am sorry, but I have to post again. THANK YOU VERY VERY MUCH. This is an excellent thing you have done. IT looks great. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif Just wanted to let you know. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

P.S. I hope you do not mind, but I posted information at my site about your file. I want everyone to know how useful it is. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif
http://www.angelfire.com/zine/cnchome/news.html

[This message has been edited by Atrocities (edited 14 February 2001).]

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

I've finally been published. What the hell do those law review editors know anyway? (will only make sense to anyone who has toiled thru 3 years of law school - yuck)

Atrocities, went to your site and I must say, I'm blushing.

Nice site by the way. Very up-to-date and informative.

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Character is best defined as that which you do when you believe nobody is watching.

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

Yes, it is very helpful. I am greating a graphical depiction of the research tree in PowerPoint and will publish it when done. I also am creating some tabular information for each of the Facilities, Modules, Weapons, etc, in Excel which I will publish at the same time.

Paul E. Mason
Senior VMS Systems Administrator

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

Tampa - I feel your pain - 200+ hours? WOW

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Character is best defined as that which you do when you believe nobody is watching.

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

Wow! I was definitely not expecting hyperlinks in Excel. Great job!

Now... since it's in Excel already, I wonder if someone could make it do the math to calculate how many research points each tech field costs?

Maybe one of our resident mathematicians such as DirectorTsaarx or Zantris?

http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

WhiteHojo - as someone who's maquiladora article got trashed after 200+ hours of working on it (b/c the Mexican Congress modified it in a late session) I understand!!

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

I have updated WhiteHojo's most excellent spreadsheet, changing the worksheet name and all related hyperlinks as he suggested. I also added three buttons to sort the techs by various criteria.

Security Notice: The sort buttons make use of Excel macros. If you are wary of macros in downloaded files (you probably should be), you can disable macros when loading this file and everything will still work except for the sort buttons. The downloaded Zip file should be exactly 230,801 bytes. The enclosed .XLS file should be exactly 1,159,168 bytes. If either of these have changed, I can no longer vouch for the contents.

Paranoia aside, Happy SE4ing!

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

Someone below mentioned they would like to see the research cost of each tech added to the spreadsheet. This got me to snoopin and I found that, with my present information or lack thereof, I am not able to figure the research cost of any tech above it's initial level 1 cost.

In the TechArea data file, it lists all the techs, the max # of levels and the initial cost of a level. Under the definition of Levle cost the file lists the following: Level Cost:
The cost to increase one level in this tech area. The cost increases by the game setup factor as the levels get higher.

My question is does anyone know what these cost increase multipliers are? I assume it has some link to the tech level cost option (low, med and high) that can be set in the initial game setup. But w/o knowing the formula that the game uses to increase the cost of each successive level of tech, it will be impossible to compute the research cost for each level of tech in the game.

any help would be appreciated.

ps - Taterbill - nice work... one question I have is how do I link other columns to each row when using the your sort buttons? I added some info to column D but when the sort buttons are used, the new Column D info did not stay adjacent to its correct unit description.

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Character is best defined as that which you do when you believe nobody is watching.

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/ima...ons/icon10.gif
Nice work guys

tic

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

I do.

I figured this out back in the day.

I have it written down, I'll post it on Tuesday.

They way I figured it out was this:

Start a game by yourself, and just go through the research tree.

With each level, it's a modified increase. A modified increase is straight increase X a percent. As you rise in the levels of a research topic, that percent is less and less.

Example:

Ship Construction level 1 := 10,000
Ship Construction level 2 := 20,000
Ship Construction level 3 := 45,000
Ship Construction level 4 := 80,000

So the third level is 20,000 X 2.25%
The fourth level is 45,000 X 1.7777%

Formula Current Project total/Previous Total

80,000/45,000 := 1.777777%

This is the pattern, so if you want you could just go through the research tree and figure out the percent each level increase.
Hope this helps.


Hope this helps.

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

As a followup to SunDevil's post, it is extremely easy to change the output of a Research Lab I up to around a million or so. Last night, I researched all the standard techs plus Organic, Temporal and Religous. Tonite, I'll put them in an Excel spreadsheet, double check them and post them if anyone else is interested in helping calculate the multipliers?

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>My question is does anyone know what these cost increase multipliers are? I assume it has some link to the tech level cost option (low, med and high) that can be set in the initial game setup.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

For a Low Tech Cost Game:
The multiplier is simply tech level. It is linear.
For Example, Ship construction
Level Cost = 10000
Level 2 cost is 10000 X 2 = 20000
Level 3 cost is 10000 X 3 = 30000
Level 4 cost is 10000 X 4 = 40000

For a Med Tech Game:
The multiplier is the result of Tech Level rasied to the power of 2 and then divided by 2.

For example, Ship Construction again
Level 2 cost is 10000 X 2(2 to the power of 2 is four divided by 2 is 2) = 20000
Level 3 cost is 10000 X 4.5(3 to the power of 2 is 9 divided by 2 is 4.5) = 45000
Level 4 cost is 10000 X 8(4 to the power of 2 is 16 divided by 2 is 8) = 80000


For a High Tech cost game the multiplier is
Tech level raised to the power of 2

Ship Construction again
Level 2 cost is 10000 X 4(2 to the power of 2 is 4) = 40000
Level 3 cost is 10000 X 9(3 to the power of 2 is 9) = 90000
Level 4 cost is 10000 X 16(4 to the power of 2 is 16) = 160000


Whitehojo, you should be able to plug those into your spreadsheet to automatically calculate the reseaerch cost for a component.

The only place the formula breaks down is calculating the level 1 cost for any tech in a medium cost game. Then you get 1 to the power of 2 divided by 2 results in .5 as a multiplier, and clearly that is incorrect. You could get around that by simply putting the level cost as the research cost for any tech level 1 component.


[This message has been edited by geoschmo (edited 17 February 2001).]

[This message has been edited by geoschmo (edited 17 February 2001).]

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

Wow! Very impressive.

Great job!

[This message has been edited by raynor (edited 17 February 2001).]

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

ACK! You are correct Raynor. I will fix that now.

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

I wrote a quick program to read in the techarea.txt file and generate a new file with all the tech levels and their cost using the formula Geoschmo provided. I attached the text file in case anyone is interested.

Edit-&gt;The file is just med tech cost.

[This message has been edited by raynor (edited 17 February 2001).]

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by WhiteHojo:
ps - Taterbill - nice work... one question I have is how do I link other columns to each row when using the your sort buttons? I added some info to column D but when the sort buttons are used, the new Column D info did not stay adjacent to its correct unit description.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I hope Taterbill won't mind if I go ahead and answer this question. Thanks to both WhiteHojo and Taterbill for this excellent job.

1. On the View Menu, go down to ToolBars and put a check next to the Visual Basic toolbar.

2. On the Visual Basic Toolbar, you should see three icons in the middle. The third from the left says 'Design Mode'. Click on this one. Excel should display a small window with an identical icon in the middle of your spreadsheet.

3. Right click on one of the three sort buttons and select 'View Code' from the menu.

You should see the code for the three buttons. Look for lines that look like this in all three of them:

Range("A2:C771").Select

4. Change the C to a D so that it applies the Select operation to columns A through D instead of just A through C.

5. (Close the Visual Basic Window and click the Design Mode icon in the middle of your screen to go back to normal view)

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

I was wondering if anyone in this thread has updated the spreadsheet with the 1.27b data files as well as research point cost? If so could you please repost it here?

Thanks!

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

I haven't done any updating since the 1.27 patch - dang work is gettin in the way - but if someone else wants to use my original file feel free to update it.



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Character is best defined as that which you do when you believe nobody is watching.

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by geoschmo:
For a Low Tech Cost Game:
The multiplier is simply tech level.....
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Geo...in my travels while trying to graphically map out the tech tree, I noticed a WHOLE LOT of 666,666 and 333,333 numbers...this tells me that there is a '3' in the formula somewhere. Now, I did all my research at the medium cost level....

Spyder, Chairman of the Arachnid Consortium

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

BUMP

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

bump

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

Bump, since there's been mention of it in the beg. guide thread.

Re: Tech Levels in Excell Spreadsheet format...
 

I will put a chart and attach a database with the numbers and formulas etc... in the beginners guide. I will post the chart and database here for verification purposes.

Once it is approved then I will use it in the manual.

p.s. This post will occur during the week of Dec. 3rd.

Any preference for the database.



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Utinam logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant!