[geoschmo]

Originally posted by PvK:
However, that's only really necessary if you want human players to be able to play the primitives, and to enforce their research rate.

With AI-controlled races, they are stuck with their pre-programmed research path. Therefore, you can program them to research "steam tech or whatever" for a long time before going on to "space tech or whatever", and get the same effect you were talking about.

PvK

PvK, I think that this is a brilliant deduction and makes this whole idea a more practical possibility. You don't need to have separate racial traits at all. You simply have the exsisting tech path that everyone plays on start much earlier in the tech tree than it currently does. Everybody basically starts then as a "primitive race", only the human players know what to research to get to star farring status fairly quickly. The AI would be programed in their research files to not go for the certain "breakthrough" techs that would open up the areas needed for space race status.

Since these breaktrhough techs wouldn't be racial techs they would be easily gifted to the primitive AI and they would be able to upgrade and research farther.

For example. Ship construction. Instead of that being a root tech you make a pre-requisite tech for it and don't tell the AI to research the pre-req. Tell them to research ship construction though. They can't until someone gives them the pre-req. After that they can progress normally.

You could work several levels of these "breakthrough" techs into the research tree so there could be several distinct types of AI primitives. Everyone starts out as stone age. You could program some AI to advance to industrial, some would be left at stone age. All by telling them whether or not to research the specific breakthrough techs.

Another nice thing is that once this expanded tech tree is worked out, you could set up the "breakthrough" techs so that they start out at level 1 in a medium tech game. Then a low tech game would be truely low tech with primitives included, but a medium tech game would be what we are used to now, where everyone is at the level of being able to make space ships and no primitive races.

Geoschmo

[ April 28, 2003, 13:06: Message edited by: geoschmo ]