Tech Limits

You are not quite right, there are some Tech changes, you just must follow the icons, you cannot develop Battleship until youdevelop other military and other sciences kind of techs, so I think that the tech it is fine.

Hi!
I quite agree with Hermann, maybe in the next expansion pack the designers can add some new features, maybe instead of just proposing them here, we can ask them to add a special thread in the forum, in which some of the features can be deeply discussed by the players!!

BTW, nice idea!!

S1mone

I agree also.After so many games things start to get a little stall.There are no xformations of any kind,Just keep building abilities that are already present.Maybe research should open one path and close another depending on your picks.This way with all the submissions they are bound to have several paths that one can chose and the game might be alittle more different from game to game.

Far be it from me to argue with a Jedi...but while BB is a critical tech, a BB is (more or less) a bigger, badder FF, and then a Dreadnought is a bigger, badder BB.

This is true. Perhaps a better example would be Transports with the Impulse Drive, or Freighters with Trade.

The only really transformative thing in the game, in my opinion, is Eyes of the Universe.

You're right, and it does greatly decrease the excitement of exploring the tech tree when you know there's nothing really revolutionary along it.

It does help the AI play better, though, since it doesn't have to deal with a whole bunch of different types of tactics.

The only bona-fide example there is.I don't count the morality change of screens.

There are actually several world-changing techs:
-Universal Translator = allows diplomacy. Problem is you will have it very early.
-Stellar Cartography = localizes yellow stars. Totally useless.
-Aliances = allows alliances. Not groundbreaking, but something.
-Diplomacy = allows change of government. The other govs don't change much because it's a no-brainer to go for these.
-Cultural Conquest = May not be this one, but until you can build party palaces, the culture starbases are quite useless. This is about the only tech that does allow for a change in tactics in-game, and the ai doesn't react very well to it.

Eyes of the universe only increases your sensor range. It looks different because it is the only thing in the core game that does so.

Plus there are the mighty Anti Matter Missiles, which are different from everything before (Hermann, you've installed the bonus pack?)

There are also invasion tactics. The problem with these is that you get most of them early on anyway, and will never use more than one or two of them.

I think it would be possible to make something more groundbreaking by modding, though I let this down because the ai wouldn't follow me and I wanted to have stellar cartography bundled with something else:
-Have a turtle ships tech branch allowing huge defenders with negative speed (tey stay where they are built - call them missile bases if you like).
-Have very different range/speeds. For instance, provide a ship with speed 10 but low attack stats at some branch in the tree. Modding range for colony ships would be great if only the ai knew that it needs a starbase to extend its range.

There used to be talks of bomber ships. Again, the main problem looks like coding the ai so it learns how to use the new stuff.

You could do this quite easily now, it's just not pre-designed. This is part of why GalCiv is easily modable.

Then again, I did have an idea for something that would require significant changes to the underlying game to support.... A play off of the note that Altarians apparently have supernatural powers: a tech mid-way through the tree would involve genetically engineering humans to gain that ability. After that, basic (and eventually advanced) 'powers' could be researched as well as standard techs. How much those powers would affect your abilities would depend on how many similar powers you've already discovered. Some of the possible powers would be difficult to set up right now, like mind control to take over ships or planets, and such. The planets part could be done as an invasion tactic, but the game has no way of 'aquiring' another player's ships outside of diplomacy.

~SDC~

Have not played RoN, but if it is like the civ games, gunpowder gives musketeers......a bigger better pike/phalanx/ect.... new tech gets better units (et al). This is fairly standard in tbs games. Guess it's all one's POV.

If one really wanted to change the genre, you would need more than adding a whatever to build better whatevers. IE: multiple tech trees, that don't all end at the same place, and ones you can't cross over. If you choose to go culture, then you can't research military techs. Some games it might be the best choice, other games that choice might cause you to lose. (games: not meaning different titles, but different starts of the same title.... for those anal argumenters out there)

Since the techtree is totaly unorganized it is rather senseless. Most of them give nothing, or only a bonus to a existing ability. Less would have been more.

Yes but the ai doesn't know how to play drastic changes mods. Typically, a mod that requires 'combined arms' (colony ship useless without starbases) doesn't work for the ai. Fast ships are good for scouting/harassing, but the ai would probably leave them near the opponent after they struck instead of fleeing back to safety. Already, they don't really profit from the speed of frigates in order to do hit'n'run, and they wouldn't use bigger ships to patrol minifreighters (keeping them exactly in sync with the freighter to avoid hit'n'run).

Yes it would be nice to have a guard function that could escort your freighters so they don't end up as space junk.

How about some sort of convoy escort ship? High defense, follows freighters.

I wonder if someone could mod that...

You can't mod anything for freighters.Once the civilians take over the route you can't do anything other than cancel the route.

That's what the trade federation UP event is supposed to do... not for certain though, because every time I get it the AIs vote it down LOL

The trade federation stops all attacks on freighters for a certain period of time. I want a ship that a player would have to build that could make trade routes harder to destroy, not impossible.
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This aspect of the game is hard coded if I'm not mistaken.You can only follow them on minimap and have absolutely no control over them.To bad you can't move their routes somewhere else specially when at war and going thru enemy sectors.

Well, all good points about how hard it would be to code the AI to use "transformations" effectively. After all, the AI uses what it has rather poorly.

LDiCesare mentioned Cultural Conquest and AMMs. I haven't gone the Party Palace route yet (maybe I'll do so in the maso game I have running). As for the AMMs, I would have been, um, "taken aback" to see the five dreadnoughts that the Altarians had in orbit, but I had a bunch of AMMs to soften them up (that was the Crippling game I finished today).

That depends on the exact nature of the change. I don't know if it would handle a hit-and-run ship, but it does seem to make good use of the Plasma Mines in the library now as a defense.
~SDC~
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