I was thinking about this a few days ago, and therefore have a question - is it possible to have conditions within diplomacy in which technology is involved?

What I mean by this is, for example, the treaty between the Romulans and Federation whereby the Romulans sealed their border, and in exchange the Federation agreed to abandon cloaking technology. Another example is when the Klingons gave the Romulans the D-7 Cruiser in exchange for cloaking technology.

Would it be possible then for negotiations, such as for a non-aggression pact, to include things like the transfer of various technologies, and possibly even starship design?

I personally would still like the various cultures to maintain theur preferred technologies - say Romulans specialise in cloaking, Klingons in weapons, Federation in shields and engines etc - but it would add a lot more replay value.

Just a thought.

This has been discussed in the past, and we came to the comclusion that it would be difficult to implement specific things like the Treaty of Algeron (Feds abandoning Cloak tech) without first making huge changes to the techs in the game - since there aren't any cloaking techs in the game, how are you suposed to trade them?

It might be possible to trade the existing techs though - you've still got Food, Energy, etc. I'm not sure many people would use this option because it's playing with fire, but it might be fun to see the Klingons lose a war against the Ferengi because you sent them a few of your secrets...

We'll have to wait and see what Mike says about the idea.

Ah fair enough - I thought that might be a problem, and then of course you'd have the issue of the races being too similar to each other.

A possible solution could be say giving each race unique technologies they can research - like Romulan cloaks - that could be traded or whatever as a unique technology and not part of the regular tech tree.

Oh another idea I had - I have many - the idea of stealing opposition starships such as you can do in BotF, but then have the option of reverse-engineering them. You wouldn't get to build them, but would gain advances in technology relative to what that ship has, and at the same time your forces would be more effective against that ship class whilst it would become less effective. Another option could be keeping the ship intact and sending it back into the owners space to spy.

Reverese engineering might be a good idea, but it would likely be hellish to program. I'm not an expert in that field though...actually i'm not even as advanced as a noob when it comes to programming...

If there are unique techs though, what would be the point if you could trade them? And what use would they have to the other races? You would have to create buildings etc that had specific tech requirements that all the other races would have access to but only if they had the tech requirements. But what would these buildings be? Would the AI be able to know how to use them correctly? When would the AI decide it was time to trade?

I know, lots of questions, but they need to be thought about. Again we must wait for Mike.

Well in terms of Cloaking, for example, there's two ways you can look at it.

1. Cloaking as a general research item, all races can research it. This has the benefit of allowing a more open-ended game, but reduces the uniqueness of the factions

2. Cloaking as a Romulan-specific technology. This is acquired through general Romulan research, but can ONLY be attained by other races if the Romulans give it to them - you cannot steal it, or 'win' the technology. This has the benefit of making the races more unique, and gives the Romulans (and other races with their unique tech) a valuable bargaining tool if they want something from you.

A looong time ago, we discussed about the possibility of having a technology war, where the Feds would develop sensors while the Roms developed Cloaks. This idea doesn't seem to have been taken on board though. I'm not even sure the thread still exists. We lost a lot of stuff when Jig deleted the old Game Development forum because most of it was no longer relevant.

Well i hope the scanning part is still going live in game. i.e You can build scanners and you can build jammers but only a limited amount therefore you get a variation of areas which can see better and others which can't.

Regards Wolfe