Help! Ran out of stuff to research!!

[Tomgs]

Hmm atmosphere changers are also useless after the atmosphere has changed but you can also scrap it out and use that space.

Well I guess you could perhaps move a different race onto the planet and see if it changed the atmosphere again .

I understand that a lot more facilities are involved when you talk about research facilities but the principal is the same. Yes it would always be better if there were more areas to research but more can be added by modding them in. You can also make the Phased Poleron Beam less effective in your games so you would want to research other areas.

One problem if infinite technology was added into the game how would you play an all tech game then? The computer would go into an infinite loop, I haven't caused one of those since I studied fortran in college .

Actually my favorite fix for this research problem would be to have a bit of randomness added to the research areas. If you don't know the actual range or damage for each specific weapon each time you started up the game you would have to spend more time researching because the first thing you researched probably wouldn't be the baddest weapon on the block for that game. And if the resource production for mineral miners came out low resources would be at a premium and Organic tech races might do better that game.


[This message has been edited by Tomgs (edited 11 February 2001).]

[Warlord Adamus]

raynor- You are missing the point. Of course having tons of research facilities around *after* you have already researched everything don't help you. But, you should have scrapped them before then. Your whole assertion in this thread was that empires that focus on research especially are penalized, my view is that they are not.

Your intel comparison doesn't cut it, as the missions are canned, single level operations. The lone programmer can not input a limitless amount of techs so that the research facilities are totally useful throughout the entirety of 'raynor's' game. As I already mentioned, if you've researched the entire tree you should have already won by then. The other solutions on this thread are fine.

[raynor]

There are two points I've been making here. The first point is: I want more research fields. I think the best way to get more research fields is to make very expensive techs that take many turns to research but which result in smaller components.

The second point I've been trying to make is that if there isn't anything left to research, then there should be *something* to do with those research facilities. Don't expect me to accept the 'Oh, just scrap them then' argument anytime soon.

[raynor]

quote:

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You are missing the point. Of course having tons of research facilities around *after* you have already researched everything don't help you. But, you should have scrapped them before then. Your whole assertion in this thread was that empires that focus on research especially are penalized, my view is that they are not.

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Nope. My first point was that I wanted more research areas. My second focus was the creation of open-ended research projects that generate intel points.

quote:

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Your intel comparison doesn't cut it, as the missions are canned, single level operations. The lone programmer can not input a limitless amount of techs so that the research facilities are totally useful throughout the entirety of 'raynor's' game.

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I think the point I was trying to make about the intel projects was along the lines of what to do with the research facilities--i.e. create a reseach project that generates intel points so that intel facilities aren't useless after everything has been researched.

[raynor]

quote:

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Originally posted by Instar:
What CivII did was you could reseach just to get score points.

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Just wanted to quote Instar so that some of you who only read the Last message by Adamus could see that we were at one point *actually* talking about something to do with research facilities other than just scrap them once everything was researched.

[raynor]

quote:

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The lone programmer can not input a limitless amount of techs so that the research facilities are totally useful throughout the entirety of 'raynor's' game.

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This is an essentially false statement.

It is extremely easy to add a very small number of extremely expensive research projects which produce identically featured components which are smaller than the originals. If the cost for each project is exponentially more expensive, certainly, it will be possible to eventually research them all. But if the cost of these 'Advanced' technologies is ten times as much as all the other technologies in the game combined, I would argue that you are 'approaching' limitless technology.

(And yes, I'm gonna create these myself--with the help of awesome folks like SunDevil, Tampa_Gamer, etc who are amazingly willing to help folks like me create weird stuff. Just gotta finish my formation editor, then the component editor, then...)

[klausD]

raynar
I dont think that minimizing components is the solution for "eternal" research. It was once a good try in MOO2 but in this game everything was fixed and not editable.

Thankfully in SE4 you can add an awful amount of new and very advanced techs to the tech tree. This is an important feature of the game which we could use to solve the problem.

My suggestion would be extend the techtree with several very expensive techs (maybe Mio of techpoints each level) and making them public for others of course )
The problem is just to evaluate how many techs you need that you can never run out of them even in a very long 250 system game.

Such handling of the prob would be a lot more fun than this "dry" future level x thing in MOO2.

bye
Klaus

PS: another help would be the suggestion I made below with a tech multiplier, IMO.