This is a proposed modification to the current research management system.
Problems with current system
Currently, players get to choose from 4 or 5 techs for which they have the prerequisites, and players can "reroll" the random techs for a small penalty to research speed. This system creates a few problems in my opinion:
- Some technologies unlock critical capabilities which are central needs to almost every playthrough, e.g. building farms or invading core planets. With the random system, there is no way to know when these techs will be made available.
- I'm assuming that one goal of this system is to avoid Analysis Paralysis (AP), where players have to peruse the entire tech tree to figure out which tech to research next. But it doesn't actually resolve that problem, because even with the limited selection of which tech to research next, we still need to learn the whole tech tree in order to know the techs we need to research whenever they appear in order to reach one that we want.
Proposal
My proposal is to have two systems: a core tech tree and a tech pool.
The core tech tree would function exactly as a normal tech tree (like GC3), but it would be limited to the core, critical technologies. This tree would only have ~20 techs in it. Very easy to peruse and understand quickly. These are the techs that unlock basic functionalities, like building farms as described above. (Since the tree would not be super deep, researching techs in this tree would need to be restricted or limited in some way. I have several ideas for this which I'll explain at the end.)
The tech pool would function exactly like the current GC4 system. The only difference is that it doesn't include the core technologies which are on the core tree. Techs from the pool could depend on core tree techs or other pool techs, so you can have as much depth as you want here. Endgame technologies would be great candidates for the pool.
Whenever the player chooses a research, he can select from either the tree or the random 4-5 techs selected from the pool.
Why it's better
This solution addresses the problems with the current system. Since the core techs are available in the small tree, they will be easy to find, and the player will always have the ability to see the clear research path needed to reach these techs. This will limit AP and also ensure that the player will be able to get access to these basic capabilities on their desired schedule.
How to limit tree research
One challenge of this solution is that, since the tree with the critical technologies is compact, it makes the path to reaching these techs shorter than they are now. Most of the critical techs are early in the dependency chain anyway, but some (e.g. planet invasion) do take a while to get to. So we need to "slow down" access to techs on the main tree. I can think of 3 good solutions to this problem:
- GC3-style "age", where you can't research techs in the tree until X turns have passed. I don't love this solution, but hey, it worked in GC3.
- Research times on the core tree could start out very long, i.e. 5x the normal research time. Then, these core techs could have a list of related "desired" techs from the pool which function like soft prereqs: the pool techs are not actually required to research any core techs, but when the "desirement" pool techs are researched, they decrease the time required to research the corresponding core techs. (This is my favorite solution, and I'm happy to explain in more details if folks are interested.)
- Core techs could be locked until a given number of pool techs from the same family are researched. (e.g. you can't research planet invasion until you've researched 5 military pool techs.)
Please let me know your thoughts!
