Is there support for different techtrees for different empires?
Weapons and propulsion would be the main differences I guess, but a lot could be made different like availability timing.
Minors could have their own techtree (one for all), with their own basic structures and the race specific items (structures and ships) would be filtered by a pre-req race tag.

Right now you can do it via a shortcut switch, but I would like to enable mod switching from within the game as well (but not while a game is in progress).

I think that would be a little over-the-top. Plus, if the tech tree is the same for every empire, one could trade individual techs .

Untradable racial techs.

Inconsistent behavior.

Adjustable Tax (since we're taking ideas from GalCiv2...)

That way, we can directly affect our Credits per turn on the + side, and when our 'empire' is happy at a certain level and we have plenty of credits in the coffers, bring on the starship construction.

Another thing, taken from the mockup GUI pages, was related to what I was talking about before:
System construction Macros.

Basically, a micro-manager can skip all this, but for those of us who don't like having to micromanage every single system each turn, Macros could be enabled, macros which would be written by us prior to a game.

For instance. I'm starting a T6 or above game, and dont want to micromanage the startup of the systems.

Now, I've "set up" the macros before hand.so on turn whatever, my 3 colony ships reach some systems. right-clicking and selecting colonise for each brings up a menu asking what 'profile' I want the system to follow immediately upon startup. High Farm (for if/when transporting excess food between systems becomes possible), high industry, high research or high intel, or a balanced.

Now I want each to follow a farm, a industry and intel pattern, while home system runs research.

at any point, once the system is setup, I can change it's "pattern of behavior", of course.

Now basically, on colonisation it gets a script to an autobuild cycle.

lets say its like this, replacing the code itself with statements a noncoder would understand for clarity.


oh and be warned, the 'math' for the main part of the 'macros' isn't really math, but simply placed there so you know whats the what.


Some thought would go into these, obviously. The idea behind these is that the colony automatically builds to a specific level of the users' choosing (adjusted for certain things, like a 100 population system would have different "Operational Ceiling"'s than a 400 pop system.) and once reached, the macro either ends quietly, or if the user set it to do so, calls a GUI message like say,

"System Bailar has finished construction program 'High Industry'."

Another to set up would be a "Construction Program 'Upgrades'" - which would only ever actually 'end' when all upgradable buildings have been, but then they would only *be* called on the turns where items become available. They would, I guess, 'self call' when a system queue finished an item and goes to empty, it would not recall itself each turn, regardless of items in the queue.

This would be "mid-turn" too, so yes, eventually it may get to the point that going to the next turn has it calling itself twice, or three times because the first upgrade that was available has finished, revealing two subsequent ones (say, you did 3 farm upgrades. Then it would be inactive until: Items are built and at the end of that queue it 'detects' if any have upgrades available to build, or as I said, the completion of research for the tech levels.)

I hope I made sense.

Macros are already planned Alex. Or as we refer to them, "System Governors". Mike also coined the term "Macromanagement" for the way that players will be able to interact with the game.

Adjustable tax rates are also in the Civilization games. Civ hasn't really had a good system, since you always have to choose between money and research (Research usually wins 95% of the time), but Civ 5 is going to change the system so Science and Taxes are separate. I'm looking forward to seeing how that works.

People might object to taxes in the game though. There's always been the "There is no money in Trek" philosophy, and the purists would likely object to any extension of monetary systems in the game. I was born into capitalism though, and I wouldn't object.

Civ 4 asks players whether to load a mod when they select map options. Perhaps Supremacy could do the same thing? You would only need to add some extra options to the Galaxy generator screen then, rather than design a whole new options screen just for this.

On the tax, I meant in the "Lower to increase morale" style of useage. or in other words... Tax.

Do 'system governors' in your plan have erm, not sure on the term, but the 'dont build more farms than needed' type of automation thing?

Cuz no need for more than 2 or even 1 in those systems with under 40 pop. (useless systems, those.)

Uh, GalCiv2 has this, and so do have other games. Inconsistent with what exactly?

My point was, with a new techtree, there are going to be differences between the empires. Unless you use something really generic, say Advanced Beam Weapons for example, you'd have problems with Phasers/Disruptors/etc. But then, if you do go generic, why would the Feds trading Advanced Beam Weapons to the Klingons produce Disruptors instead of Phasers?!?! THAT'S inconsistent behavior. Same thing for the Romulans' propulsion, and other stuff.
Now, you can still go with the current tech matrix's tech names and descriptions, which have basically (for the most part) nothing to do with the items they unlock - they're just pretty technobabble, good for trekkies but awful to everyone else. Ok, I shouldn't be speaking for any of the parts, just making a point.

I'm sure there are ways around it, like having a ScreenName tag for each empire, so that each item can be displayed with a different name on the screen (even though they're a single item internally); or have a huge techtree, with "repeated" items with different internal names, which are then made available / not available to each empire through a racial pre-req tag - these would be the untradable techs.

Race-specific tech names would likely be the easiest way to go. And if possible, i'd have race specific descriptions. That way you could replace Phaser with Disruptor to avoid some of the issues .Iceman mentioned, although i'd be happy enough to rewrite the descriptions from scratch if need be.

...But this doesn't get around the tech trading issue hehe.

Uh, no it doesn't. At least I'm pretty sure it doesn't.

If the players tries to trade for a tech and succeeds, and later tries again with another tech and cannot find any way to trade for it, the behavior is inconsistent.

Or something more generalized, like "Advanced Beam Compression". The tech tree should focus on theories rather than applications. Let the unlockables (i.e. ship and structure designs) fill the role of applications.

Either way, it's more work for relatively little gain. It's basically a choice between our current tech matrix and a shared tech tree. Back the option you would prefer.

I agree with Mike, research is more about how get stronger energy source, or how to minimize beam dissipation while firing, maximize energy absorption in shields... You know the stuff that can be applied to all beam type weapons, all shield types, every power source...



Well, we want to stay in the spirit of the old Star Trek which was for the fans and not the new Star Trek made for a wider audience.

More importantly, I would like to be finished with this project by the time I reach 30.

Thankfully you're 29, right?

Just joking Mr T. Six.

Uh, it's one of the selling points of the last expansion? Never played it, but I'm pretty sure I've read about it.
Of course, it's mostly the same techtree, with different names and a few stat changes. But they DO have "different" techtrees. And some techs (racial mostly) are not tradable. Players wanted a no tech brokering option and all. You should check it.
I think each race has its own techtree xml, so that you can edit each seperately. Better for modding.



?! Untradable techs don't even show on the trade screen... Not sure what the problem you're seeing is. You can only trade for what you know they have. If you don't... Like in any other game, different techtrees or not.



If it works for phaser, disruptor, nadion, polaron, etc weapons, sure.



I'm pretty happy with a single techtree. I'm not going to read the descriptions more than twice anyway.

That'd make for a very short techtree...
What about other structures? And other advancements? You're only looking at it from a ship construction PoV. There's more to the game than that.



Well, I'm an old fan, and I really hate the new stuff. Regardless, when I read the tech descriptions and they tell me nothing about what they're supposed to unlock - and some are even totally diverse in nature - I realise something is not right.

One advantage to tradable tech:

Using a races' version of tech that may be better than yours.

Lets say...

Trade tech: Cloaking Technology.

Maybe an option to apply it to upto 3 classes of ships? Or a maximum number of individual Starships (which is where the 'Fleet summary' suggestion from the other thread comes in!)

Also, Multi-race ship designs.

Klingon and Romulan perspective, Romulans get a specific tech through 'alliance' with Klingons, and can build D7's, and get to build K'Tingas afterward.

I've got GalCiv2 Ultimate edition, so yes, it is in there.

Or from the player-as-feds perspective (as usual...)

Alliance with Romulans: You get to build a only-one-at-any-time ship with cloak (aka the USS Defiant)
TRaded tech from Romulans: You can supplement your intelligence-gathering tech with additional stuff from researching the tech. similar to 'shared intel' in alliance, only you dont necessarily have to have an alliance to get a similar boost.

Klingons... Boost to farming? Based on a "The Hunting Farms have been a hit with populations tired of the same old Replicator-fashioned foodstuffs." Or advanced shield or engineering-related stuff ala a klingon ship that got hit by but wasnt affected by a breen weapon.

Cards... Better training facilities?

Dom... Long-range transporters to boost trade lanes or something? i.e. "hey, these planets are close enough, only 2 sectors apart, and one's low on food, the other has plenty!"



Cards...

I'm outa of this project if something is going to change again... 6 years of changes is enough for me.

In fairness, Supremacy has only been in development for four years. I'm generally not allowing any more high impact changes.

Ha ha yeah was thinking that the other day..... I started typing a response to a thread and just thought, god my brain hurts even thinking about this, and I'm not even involved in the project!!

That's good now we have to finish what we started.



yeah terrible pain just thinking about

I've been here all along. Well, not as long as SOM, but almost as long. I guess i'm lucky enough to be resistant to that sort of pain.

Now, about changing the shiplist...

Working on both klingon and feds shiplist, finished rebalancing klingon shiplist to match the latest models and tech levels, now going to do the same with the feds.

Would you guys mind if every shiplist is not the same?
Like the Klingons get Attack Cruiser I in the first era while some other race in the third era.....
That was just an example but I think it would bring diversity and realism to the game.

I would leave shiplist for future, our 2d images should be representation of 3d models in our stock, for feds we have dafedz models and he promised me that he will take brand new renders. Though before 3d engine is created we can use any 2d ship image cause isn't important at moment.

Well, if you take a look at my Klingon shiplist thread you'll see that we have almost all models I put in there. Maybe four models are missing.

Hmm, notice that you can't design ships, so this is moot. By getting a ship with cloak even if your empire doesn't have the tech, you're alerady simulating getting the *ship design* - which is different from having the tech. If you had the tech though, why wouldn't you use it in other designs? The design transfer was part of a one-time deal, not a tech trade.

SoM summed this up for me as well... my head hurts too! We've got a long-honed and very long-discussed framework in place, and I for one definitely wouldnt like to see any large scale changes to that. If the ideas are good and workable I say put a pin in it, and leave it on the back burner for a possible Supremacy 2 etc. Let's concentrate on this project and finish Supremacy as it stands first.

Well, Mike has been saying he wants a proper techtree in the game for at least well over a year. This is not really anything new, so I don't really understand the fuss.

.Iceman is correct: I've said this on more than one occasion during the past couple years. I consider this a renewed discussion rather than a new discussion. It's something I've wanted for a while, but there have been no volunteers to take the idea and run with it.

I'm taking a shot at it. Some things don't help though, like canon, the current format and the hundreds of tech objects in the game.

I could write a script to change the dependencies for some cases, though new dependencies would likely need to be added manually.