Exclusive Techs - Theory and Discussion

[Suicide Junkie]

If you choose armor, then the cost of shield research increases due to having to switch over your economy, technology, ships and equipment. You still can research both, but at a much higher cost than either one individually. This would allow you to research one branch much farther in the same time if it were done exclusively.

I strongly believe that replacing such things should not cost you more research. You still have to pay to retrofit your ships to use shields, pull them off the front lines, or plain rebuild from scratch.

You don't need researchers with doctorates to do grunt work in the shipyards.

-edit-
Yeah, like Erax said.



Jack:
Interesting.

As to your second part, that seems to me an example of tech C having a prerequisite D, that is also needed by B.

A= PPB
B= ECM
C= Torpedos
D= Military Science

Now, for that first part...
It sounds like this could be trying to emulate a lack of knowlege of the tech tree...

However, after the first few times playing, players will know to take tech C instead of tech A in order to get tech B
And in addition, there is no way to clear the exclusion when the race's researchers experience the paradigm shift (such as in the examples you gave)
Plenty of implementation problems, for sure.

Now, it seems to me with the system of prerequisites as seen in SE4, the tech dosen't become available for research at all until you have knowledge of everything that is required...
Thus, you can't really be sidelined by some other tech.

On the other hand, if the glass is half full, you could see it as the interesting possibility of jumping techs.
Something like a tech area that opens up cloaking devices after researching stealth armor.
That bridge tech could become unavailable after researching physics 1, but the cloaking devices are still accessible through the regular path to Physics level 3.

[ July 02, 2003, 18:13: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]