Primitives for proportions?

[geoschmo]

Cost is not a factor in repair. The only question in whether they can repair it is do they have the required technology?

[QuarianRex]

This is a sweet idea. Some thoughts though.

If including the 3 levels of primative (dirt, steam, and space) why not give them all essentially the same tech tree, just starting at different points along it. Artificially capping their tech seems kind of rude. With the proper instruction and training (a.k.a. Trade and Research agreement) even feudal societies (or lower) should be capable of being turned into productive vassal worlds. It should only be a matter of time.

To reflect this just create one tech tree with a nice progression from peasant farms to cities and such, and have each type of primitive start at a dfferent point on the tree. For example, the dirtboys tree would start at 1, the steamers would start at the equivalent of 5, and the spacelads at, say, 10. Each individual tech would start at level 1 but that level would include the appropriate advancements of the full tree up till then.

Hard to teach ewoks how to build an escort? Of course! They start at level 1 and the primatives don't get access to that until level 15 (or whatver) and level 15 is mighty expensive when all you can do is leech off of the knowledge of your betters. It's harder to train cavemen, but not impossible.

As far as giving them "upgrades" such as encanced infantry or plague resistance, I say thee nay! These guys are there for flavour, not a challenge. I don't care how many times a tribesman has to kill his own supper, he won't do squat against a hail of laser-fire. Innate plague resistance? There was a reason why our ancestors had a life expectancy of 35 years. If you want to throw it in then perhaps have level 1 plague res. at the beginning of steam (gotta love penecilin) and level 2 at the begining of space with an extra level or two put higher up in the tree.

Does anyone know if you can trade same-name techs with different racial requirements? Does the game consider them to be two different techs or the same for trading purposes?

[PvK]

This is a great idea, and there are lots of good sub-ideas here. I had fiddled with similar ideas, but as Dogscoff says, I probably won't ever get time to do them myself.

I would suggest making the "normal tech" tech area actually cost a pretty high number of points (whatever it's actually worth) and then adding a disadvantage everyone can take to give them enough points to buy it. This is what I did in Foundations, and it makes it possible to add other types of races (swarm, extradimensionals, pirate, monster, whatever) as well, and keep creation point balance. I called the normal tech "Industrial Construction" in Foundations, although I wasn't entirely happy with the term.

QuarianRex, the game does know the difference between components with the same name.

For Intel of primitives, perhaps give their facilities a small level of Intel, and then give them a fairly good racial-tech defense mission, and little or no offensive intel missions.

PvK

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by QuarianRex:
If including the 3 levels of primative (dirt, steam, and space) why not give them all essentially the same tech tree, just starting at different points along it.

If I understand what you are saying, this would be awesome, but quite impossible to do currently in any sort of mod. It would require hard code changes. Everybody starts at the same tech level in SE4. Unless you are setting up a scenario there is no way around that, other then seperate racial tech areas.

Geoschmo

[Lord Kodos]

LR mod has primitives! Seriously it was one of the earlies planned features.

Speaking of...

I realy an EXTREMELY early early early alpha soon. All my work was lost in yet ANOTHER catastrophic PC crash,ive started anew, with a little help from some backups.

Actually things are going quite nicely.

But anyway back to topic, yeah, this would be VERY cool, and if anyone decides to get to work on this i wouldent mind lending a hand or two.

Later.

[QuarianRex]

Originally posted by PvK:
QuarianRex, the game does know the difference between components with the same name.

I wasn't specific enough. I meant tech areas. If you had two racial techs (say for normals and primatives) with the same name for both (say ship construction) could you trade those racial techs? Does the game tech areas with the same name but different origins to be the same tech area?

Originally posted by geoschmo:
If I understand what you are saying, this would be awesome, but quite impossible to do currently in any sort of mod. It would require hard code changes. Everybody starts at the same tech level in SE4. Unless you are setting up a scenario there is no way around that, other then seperate racial tech areas.

No, I'm talking about three different tech areas, one for each type of primative (dirt, steam, and space). What I meant is for them all to follow a recognizably similar progression. So at Dirt 5 (or whatever) you would have access to the same techs as Steam 1. At Dirt 10 you would have the same tech as Steam 6, which would be the same as Space 1, etc.

No hardcode changes needed, just a recognizable progression of technological advancement. This way space civs will be able to benefit the most from initial research (as they should) while cave dwellers can also reach such heights if given enormous amounts of help (research alliances) and copious time.

This way all races at least have the potential to reach the stars if not the ability.

[Aloofi]

That's an awesome idea!

I would like not just completely primitive civilizations, but also races like Earth today, with the capability of researching missile technology, and DUC, but maybe not the other guns, and with no spaceships, but with "orbital fighters" to defend the planet, weapons platforms, satellites and bases, and maybe drones... .
What about an Neutral AI that only builds units and bases?
That would make for a really tough homeworld in Proportions. I can easily see a Primitive homeworld with 300 WP, a 100 sats and a minefield of 100 large mines...., and maybe 40 000 000 infantry......