Is there a way to lock research paths?

[Reverend Zombie]

llamabeast said:
I don't actually think it's a problem to be honest, it only takes a few seconds at most to get it how you want it.

I've been frustrated with this problem since Dom 2. It's a royal pain.

[T77]

Another problem is that sometimes pressing + or - doesn't go up or down by 1, it moves by 2 or 3. And clicking on the bars doesn't work either.

[Olive]

Yes, a button to lock / unlock a path, like in Master of Magic for Mana/Research/Skill if I remember well, would be great.

And the + / - should add / substract points 1 by 1, it's always frustrating to spend time trying to adjust precisely research, and not succeeding at it.

Something more, when choosing a school to display the list of spells, the spells are sorted by levels. Near of the level, it would be nice to have the research points needed to reach it.

Ex :

Alteration 1 : OK.
...
...
... List of spells
...
...

Alteration 2 : OK.
...
...
... List of spells
...
...

Alteration 3 : 43 remaining.
...
...
... List of spells
...
...

Alteration 4 : 203 remaining.
...
...
... List of spells
...
...

etc...

OK, it's actually possible to calculate it if needed, but it would be more comfortable to have it displayed.

[DanielM]

I agree that locking research paths is a must.

Another possiblity I have seen in other games:

The bars can be used as weights, i.e. each bar can take any value between 0 and 100 independently from the others. The amount of points allocated to each path is then determined by (weight for this path)/(total sum of weights)*(number of points available).

Though that would probably be more difficult to implement than simple locking.

[llamabeast]

Actually, I do definitely agree that complete fine-tuning is sometimes impossible. I just give up, and accept wasting 2 or 3 research points, which I guess is a bit poor really. Also the + and - keys seem a bit erratic to me, I don't know if I'm being somehow inept.

[lch]

T77 said:
Another problem is that sometimes pressing + or - doesn't go up or down by 1, it moves by 2 or 3. And clicking on the bars doesn't work either.

What, you can use + and - keys?? Whahoo! I didn't know that, I was missing buttons for exactly that, ALOT. I got fairly good at making mouse clicks with single pixel precision now, though.

[RonD]

I can see this as being a nice tweak to the UI, but I *never* spread research around 3 schools, and the only time I split between 2 schools is when I will reach my current goal in a school that turn.

Presumably you have specific reasons to be researching particular schools. Suppose your current strategic goals are to be able to cast falling frost and arrow fend, and you want to reach contruction-6. I cannot imagine a case in which you would be better off reaching all 3 goals simultaneously in, say, 15 turns. By focusing on one at a time, you might be able to cast falling frost in 4 turns, then forge const-6 items at the 10-turn mark, and still be able to cast arrow fend on turn 15. That's 11 turns in which you would be able to use falling frost, and 5 turns worth of forging that you would not have been able to do by going for all 3 goals at the same time.

[Taqwus]

It would likely be more realistic if there were nonlinearities and synergies -- too little or too much attention paid to one research area having lower efficiency, and possibly the occasional benefits from cross-pollenation -- but it'd also lead to optimization-hell where players run programs to find maxima.

I sort of like the ol' non-determinism of MOO2:BAA (probability of breakthrough per round once threshold achieved), but I rarely went as far as to take Uncreative...

[BigDisAwesome]

I fully agree with RonD. The only example I could ever think of is very late game where you're pumping out tons of research and you starting researching paths you haven't touched yet. But by that point it wouldn't hurt to go all your points in 1 thing the first turn, all in another the 2nd turn, and all in the other the 3rd turn. If they were more important you wouldn't have waited until that late in the game to research them.

[SafeKeeper]

If you could simply choose, by for example holding shift while allocating research points, to have your choice affect no other bars, that'd be it. Problem fixed. Then if you had un-allocated points when trying to leave the screen, you'd be stopped from doing so.