Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

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GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #14 - How many turns should that thing take?

So how many turns should it take to get a thing? Turn based games live and die on pacing balance. We don’t have a speed button to zip over bad pacing choices. So we have to be very, very careful on the number of turns something takes to get.

Take research for example. How many turns? 1 turn seems too generous. 8 turns is pretty long. But do you make the tech cost more or find ways to reduce the amount of research or whatever you’re getting in.

Let’s take a look at this example and work our way through it. So Armed Shuttles shows up at taking 1 turn. That’s too fast I think. On the other hand, it has a 50% discount which means it would have taken 2 turns. That still seems pretty quick though.

So is the tech too cheap OR is the amount of research we’re starting out with too high?

Let’s look at how much research we’re getting:

First off, why do we get 2 free research? That seems overly generous. Let’s get rid of that. So I got into the globaldefs.xml file and find that and get rid of it.

Now we’re here:

Ok. But still, start of game, that’s a pretty big number too.

Holding down the SHIFT key lets me do tooltips within tooltips.

The technology input seems like a lot for this early.

More tooltips within tooltips:

Wow, Rebe is giving me a lot of tech. That’s one of my colonies.

So it starts with 4 and 3.27 is getting to me. That’s pretty generous.

Let’s go back to the globaldefs.xml

I increase the rate to 2% per tile away. This changes the number to:

Now with this changed, let’s go back to the research center:

Armed shuttles are now at 2 (they would normally take 4 turns). Now the question is, is the 50% reduction to research cost too generous? I feel like if we changed that it wouldn’t be tempting enough to pick one.

And so the iteration goes.

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Now the question is, is the 50% reduction to research cost too generous?

I think it's fine, many times I even had some techs on the side being cheaper than the ones offered. I know they are probably "weaker" ones, but might even be more useful to my situation. Speaking of techs...

Now that you changed the pick the tech system, I think something of a flaw appeared. Before you could pick only 4, with a reroll. It was limiting in some way, but also make the choice easy to ponder about. Now you can end up in a situation in which you need to choose one tech out of 25, with that choice coming every couple of turns, and the screen is a bit cumbersome to read (and even compare different techs in value). Sometimes I feel that techs should be condensed a bit between them and take longer to research, instead of lots and lots of techs with very minor benefits.

At least the decay changes would make research come a bit less often, so it helps on that regard, but the "decision paralysis" is still a possible issue. At some point, I don't even care about comparing 20+ techs and go for the cheapest.

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I noticed it is too fast. I have game pace on slow and not even half-way through the science tree I was getting 1-2 turn research times. I don't think i even had many scientists yet either.

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Very interesting!

Base Value of +2 seems to be a worst case security: a good start and a bad start are closer (percentage wise). An increase of the decay rate would effect production and food, too. So this seems to be a very radical step. Maybe it would be better to get back to your first idea: increase the cost of early techs?

Maybe I would take too big of an approach and would not get the job done. My "big approach" would consider (at least): game speed, number of habitable planets in the galaxy, techtrading enabled

- Techs are seperated into tiers from early game to super late game (maybe 5)
- Game speed effects techs of each tier the same (today the effect is demolished the farther the game progresses)
- number of habitable planets in the galaxy: no effect to low tier techs and a high cost reduction to late game techs if you play in a small galaxy
- techtrading enabled: no effect to tier 1, scaling up, high effect to super late game techs
- or you may think about techtrading disabled instead - if "enabled" is considered the standard - : you would get a cost reduction (0 at tier 1, scaling up)

The result would be (in case of success...): you could play a game in a small galaxy without tech trading and finish the techtree (in a satisfying manner) and the same would be true for a big galaxy with tech trading enabled.

You could visualize this concept during galaxy setup (a slider, some numbers, a tooltip)

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At a closer look to the numbers: Rebe II 3.27 -> 2.26. Rebe II is just one solar system away. You do not want this change to happen unless you want us to create more core worlds.

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how about having different discounts based on tech "rarity"? Like 25% for the common ones going up to 50% for those "purple" techs

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