Open thread on improving technology system in Sins and Rebellion

If the tech system needs changes its for adding new techs and perhaps conditions (I.e. you can only research if you have planet x or something like that). I don't think anything else needs to be changed beyond rearranging the tier of some techs.

The big problem with this is that it'd only discourage early teching - which is pretty poor investment as it is.  Some of the tier 1 techs are worth picking up, but beyond that it's pretty much just unit prototypes, special abilities, and phase missiles that get researched.  People come back and backfill later once their fleets get sufficiently large.  This proposal would only worsen this situation, punishing people who buy tech early before they hit the higher lab levels and rewarding people who wait longer.

I know you, like a lot of people, love to have smaller and more advanced fleets.  But in practice this is a very poor idea.  Especially for small fleets, it just doesn't make sense.  If you have 30 LRM, simply building 3 extra frigates will increase your damage output, hull and shield values by 10%.  This will cost you a mere 825 credits, 135 metal, 75 crystal.  If you look at research costs, the only upgrades that are remotely comparable to simply building more units is the hull and armour upgrades.  And that's for the low-end upgrades, the high-end ones are completely exorbitant.

Again, keep in mind that technology is already very expensive and anything above the first few lab levels is rarely pursued by anything less than a mature fleet.  That said, I'm not opposed to reworking the technology in order to make them more influential.  Phase missiles are a perfect example of a technology that stands out on its own and is perfectly viable as an alternative to just building additional units.

We already can do that.  It's called setting research speed to "slow".  Try it some time, technology is acquired at a snail's pace.  I also like experimenting with slow build speed.

On fast and faster, though, it really is a non-issue.  Even the most die-hard researcher is going to be limited by cash and not time.  However, on the slower speeds research time is painfully slow and can hold you back from unlocking critical techs.  Late-game when you start to hammer out the higher-level techs, it can also start to queue up and slow you down.

Actually, Advent is perhaps the only faction with a decent use for its research speed bonus.  It's actually quite simple: maxing out the plasma upgrade.  If you swap over to heavy cruisers later on, you need to hammer out 9 upgrades to max out their attack damage.  This takes a substantial amount of time, even on faster, and in this is one of the few cases where paying to speed things up is worthwhile.

Agreed; it's really the cost:effect ratio that's important.  Really, though, it's always going to come down to fleet threshold (for military techs).  How big does your fleet have to be for a flat-rate technology to be more beneficial than simply building more units?  Considering the game goes up to 2000 command, I actually think the tech system scales appropriately, with the higher-level techs becoming viable as you're reaching the higher-level fleet sizes.  This means that a substantial portion of the tech tree will never be seen in small games with smaller fleets, but this leaves room for tech to remain meaningful in those rare larger-scale games.

If additional upgrade levels are added, this would give more room for technology to scale appropriately with fleet level.  But with only 3-4 levels on each upgrade currently, I don't think there's much room to reduce cost without making the tech system front-loaded and leaving little content for the real end-game scenario.

This you have my full support on.  As I've already mentioned, the phase missile offers something interesting, more than just a %-based damage bonus.  It would be nice if we could explore more avenues like this.

GoaFan77,

I like the idea of prereqs. What if we made the tree simply more stuctured, like a tree, rather than so open-ended? Or would that create more problems?

Darvin,

Thanks for the feedback. I think we both agree that something has to be done with the technology system. Something else: tech just plain isn't used in short games, other than like lrm's and carriers. It just seems that 90%+ of the tree is for after 1.5 hours, when you finally have some spare resources. I fully agree that the high-technology strategy isn't currently viable. That, to me, speaks volumes. If quantity always wins over quality, everything else being equal, isn't that kind of a game flaw? IMO, researching techs is fun. It's kind of disappointing it's ineffective.

Some ideas here that may or may not be good...

What if the number or research facilities affected the cost of research and/or research time?  For example, having 10 research facilities would reduce the research time/cost by 25% (the exact number is important right now)...obviously your trade off here is more trade ports vs. faster/cheaper research, and which is best would be dependent on how much research you are doing...

I think a lot of people would very much like to see fleet supply techs "removable" in that you could dismantle your fleet supply to reduce maintenance...there would have to be some tweaking to do this (for example, you couldn't dismantle to a FS number lower than what you are currently using) but it is worth considering...

I think its reasonable to have tech costs scale with map size...maybe not linearly ie have higher level techs increase in cost more so early game is not a pain on larger maps...

In general, I think a large portion of techs need more "bang"...a 4% increase in range for missiles or beam weapons is pretty pointless, especially at level 7...likewise, a 5% increase in crystal/metal is pretty weak given how expensive the higher level resource techs are...the payoff time is simply so long that it is just not worth it unless you are an eco player on a huge map...there are many techs (and their associated abilities) that are just not economical for all but the most extreme situations (mainly really big maps)...

One possibility to solve this is increasing the bonus of these techs, but honestly just reducing the number of levels would probably be better...for example, instead of having 3 techs for TEC missiles that increase range by 4% each, why not just have one tech that increases range by 20%?  Obviously tech costs/times would need to be adjusted...

Most games, the "research route" is at least somewhat competitive with the military rush strategy...however, sins heavily favors horizontal expansion and military size over all other factors...unless you are an eco player, vertical expansion and lots of early tech upgrades will almost certainly doom you...

There are two possible ways to deal with this (assuming it is even desireable)...first, techs could be made more powerful (a 20% boost to metal income vs a 5% boost)...however, this could be very very difficult to balance for the late game...another possibility is having tech costs scale with fleet supply...by doing this, there would be much more incentive to make your ships better instead of simply building more...

When I'm just screwing around with the AI, I'm often maxing out the tech tree after 1.5 hours even after pulling off a rush.  Trust me, it's entirely possible to hit those high-end techs as early as one hour into the game if you can get the economy to support it.  It sometimes happens that you're economically destitute and struggling to make pocket change for basic expenditures, but it should hardly be surprising that you can't afford the high-end techs in this situation.

Early on, it really shouldn't be surprising that fleet size takes precedence over upgrades.  The vast majority of your cash is going into infrastructure and fleet size, since even a few minor additions can be a massive overall boon if you're small to begin with.  Technology is a flat-rate improvement across all your assets, so you clearly need to have sufficient assets for it to be worthwhile.

Not really; there will always be a question of how much quantity is required to overcome the additional quality.  We could plot charts and take metrics and document this threshold in detail, but no matter how much changes it's always going to exist.  When comparing maxed out units to regular units, you can often win when outnumbered 3:2, which is pretty substantial.

The fact remains that maxing out most of these upgrades is a no-brainer once you surpass around the 1400-command mark, and the lower-end stuff starts to become viable as early as the 250-command mark, so we do have a fairly good range.  You could argue that most of the stuff is backloaded, but I think you could equally argue that it's frontloaded and you'll have this stuff maxed out long before reaching 2000 fleet.  Because it's a flat-rate improvement, technology is never going to scale well for both small and large forces.

Anyways, I don't think this conversation is amounting to much.  The bottom line is that you're talking about shifting the threshold at which tech becomes desirable over additional assets.  You're never going to change the fact that it's a poor investment if you have few assets and a no-brainer if you have many, you're just shifting the benchmark for "few" and "many".

Having techs behave differently on different maps would be a logistical nightmare for a player.  I develop a "feel" for how techs improve my fleet, but that'd be totally impossible if it worked differently on every map!

I seem to recall at some point early on mention of research labs affecting build times, like it was a feature that was intended at first but  later dropped.  Perhaps the impact was too minor to worry about.

I have an idea. What if you could get free techs like you get a free capital ship? say that each time you go up a tech level, you get 1 free tech. If you were to scrap a research station and then build it again, you wouldnt get a free one. This could help encourage more tech experimenting and would help fill in the gaps of those barren tech levels (advent civil tree, anyone?). I would also say it should be 1 free across all trees, otherwise the free part becomes too much.

So, for example (from the Advent perspective), I build a military lab and grab shield tech for free, then i build a civil tree and have to pay for anything in that first level. But if I build a 2nd civil lab, I can grab the arctic colony tech for free. If I then build a 2nd military tree, I have to pay for the flak prototype.

btw, I dont really think theres much wrong with the way techs are right now. I just feel a little more variety when strapped for cash could add a bit more strategy to the game.

Bee-lining high-end units?  I don't think so...Advent players will likely rush the destras (and propably repulsion) at level 5, and that's about it...it would be fair to say that sometimes you'll see a Vasari rush subverters, but not likely...and in any case, that's 1 or 2 techs per faction out of the entire tech tree ...I would hardly call that the "research route"...

Stalemates that go on for hours are rare...you and me were on a custom-designed map that was (at least in theory) perfectly symmetrical...random maps make stalemates much more unlikely, and on a FFA or anything larger than 2v2 they hardly will ever happen...anyway, that game should exemplifies the issue even more: fleet and horizontal expansion came before large investments in technology....now, from a MP perspective I'm fine with that, but from an SP perspective I think some people are looking for a bit more diversity in available strategies..

Some thoughts on improving techs and new techs to add.  Each of these below tech trees could be a mini expansion, and I would buy them all....

I like the idea of having a lot of smaller improvements to weapons as opposed to fewer large ones like in the distant suns mod.

What about adding an intelligence tech tree...might be fun?...you could do all sorts of stuff with spying, espionage, spec ops, etc.  You could have cloaked ships in here, cloaking fields, sensors that allow you to see through cloaks, mis information or propaganda ships, which have special capabilities...you could do a whole expansion just on this...

You could have a ship that when it jumps between phase lanes, it transmits a signal that makes it look like its really a much larger fleet than it is so you could send 1 ship to another planet or a group of planets and the other people when they see it on the phase lanes could think its much larger than it really is and divert some of their ships to defend just in case.  You could have a ship that projects itself into multiple places at once, making it look like their is 5 of them or something.  The Advents illuminator ability could be moved to the intelligence tree for this purpose just like certain defensive techs were moved to the defense tech tree.  You could research the ability to build deceptive defenses that don't really do anything, such as cheap missile batteries/platforms that appear to be real, however, when in fact they do nothing but are only there to provide the illusion of defenses.   They would still cost money to build, however, they would be a lot cheaper.

You could have spec ops ships which look like trade ships of your opponents but are controlled by you, so you could move them around to insert teams behind enemy lines to do subversive stuff...

A new building could be an intelligence directorate or espionage center or something that would allow you to build these ships or would enable you to build them or to research other espionage techs....this is also where you would research counter measures to enemy deception, espionage, and spec ops.

You could also have an electronic warfare tree.  You could have an electronic warefare ship that could jam enemy missiles, reducing their chance to hit considerably within it's constant area of affect.  Advent could have a mobile propaganda ship that can produce culture from anywhere, but it should have to stop to deploy and it should be very vulnerable at this point and be unable to move while it's transmitting, and would have to undeploy to move again.  Undeploying could be very slow.  This would make for some very interesting strategies indeed.  The ship should be expensive too.  Vassari could have a comm jammer which would jam enemy communications with HQ for a limited amount of time reducing the fleets overall effectiveness and also preventing human players from giving their ships orders for a short period of time preventing micro managing.  Each race could have a ship that does something along these lines, I am just throwing out an idea.  While certain ships would have ECM type devices to jam things such as missiles and targeting systems, there should also be ECCM techs in this tree.  This is also where you could upgrade your targeting systems to make your chance to hit higher or increase the number of targets a ship can fire on at once.

Perhaps the weapons and ship tech trees could be separated...one would be where you research your weapons upgrades and the other one would be where you research our ship prototypes. 

For the ship prototypes, you could also make it so that certain ship prototypes couldn't be researched until the applicable weapon system had been, essentially making it so that you had to do at least 2 levels of research to get a ship...missiles and then the ship itself.  There could be specific upgrades to the ships you could research though at the higher levels that would be really cool, such as increased targeting banks so the ships can fire more ships at once.  Each ship could have multiple upgrades to it.  Each ship could have it's speed increased, the number of targets it could target at once, etc.  Strike craft upgrades could also be bought in here.  There could be heavy strike craft, cloaked fighters, planetary bombers, etc, that could be researched.  Also, carriers could have the ability to increase the number of squads they carry.  With each ship upgrade, there could be a corresponding change to the look of the ship.  The extra gun batteries would become visible, the extra hanger bays are shown.

Also, certain types of upgrades that could be researched perhaps could be very specialized upgrades to the ships that actually require you to purchase it and upgrade every ship individually.  Say if you wanted to add additional Flack batteries to a capital ship making it much more resistant to bombers.  If you had a lot of these, it could create some very diverse strategic choices.  The total number of upgrades to a capital ship could be limited.  Say for the carrier capital ship for the advent.  You could research extra hanger bays allowing it to carry 2 additional squads, increased flak batteries, additional beam cannons, adding an additional number of beam  additional beam cannons, or repair facilities (allowing it to heal nearby ships with its antimatter), or wide are ECM jammers which could reduce the chance to hit of all missiles to ships within it's radius.  If you have a lot of strategic choices, but limited the number you could install, it would be interesting.  Say you could only upgrade each capital ship with two of these upgrades....This type of thing could also fall under special weapons or secret weapons if you wanted to make a secret weapons tech tree, which if you did, the super weapons should be moved into here.

As for upgrades to the weapons, I think all weapons should be able to increase the range of their weapon systems considerably, including SBs.  I think it would be cool to make it so that eventually, the range of your weapons could be double from what it was at the start, but the farther away from the target, the increased chance to miss, and perhaps less damage.  Less damage for beam weapons, increased chance to miss for projectile weapons.  This would take play testing to figure out.  I don't like the way though that missiles in space have a limited range b/c in space there is no gravity and once a missile starts moving, it shouldn't stop unless something stops it.  A missile could run out of fuel though and stop manuvering, or it could be jammed.

Other stuff...

Also,  I think things like beam weapons should do damage per second as opposed to a strait shot damage and the amount of damage done should be for how long the beam actually stays on the enemy ship, making it so that if the beam is on the ship longer, the ship takes more damage.  The banks that move beam weapons though should be slow resulting in if a ship moves quickly, it would be able to dodge the beam weapon...(this is a game play change and my  not be possible in the current game)

For the Titan class ships, I am hoping that these are really cool and usefull ships, however, I hope that we are not getting deathstars, war suns, terror stars (choose your name)....yet.  I want them, however, I feel that death star type ships are a step above what I am imagining titans to be so I am looking forward to those.

That's it for now, let me know what you guys think.  I think a lot of fun could be had with the espionage and electronic warfare tech trees.  Espionage itself could probably be it's own mini expansion.

I definitely like what you're thinking there. We do need some fresh ideas. The electronic warfare ones I especially like. I'll add additional comments later; anyone else have feedback or want to contribute on Sins' research system?