4X theorycrafting: leafing the tech tree

[Bacchus]

One thing always upset me in 4X games, is that knowledge of key advances is binary: once you know sailing, you know sailing, there are no better or worse sailors in the world, unless something sailing-themed is put higher up in the tech tree. To be distinctly better at application of a technology you must either have a trait, which is fine, or, in Civ, build a wonder -- which is pretty bizarre*

Have any games experimented with building in "levels" for major technologies in the tree, effectively leaf technologies which somehow augment or develop the original bonus granted by the tech? I assume there must be some, and there is always Beyond Earth with its "web" I'm interested in the pros and cons. To me it seems that having a bunch of viable leaves can introduce an interesting choice by offering the players a chance to switch between loosely exponential growth on the "trunk" of the tree and something more linear and capped on the leaves.

Also introduces narratively appealing situations where, say, top-tier swordsmen rip apart bottom-tier musketmen, but if the master swordsman fails to use that temporary advantage, he'll fall behind for the entirety of the next era at least. And then he can start gaining tourism from a commercial application of an exquisite yet practically useless martial tradition 


*it seems they have been purposefully moving away from this in latest installments, with fewer and fewer wonders having persistent global effects.

[Krill]

What's the difference between leaves and a trunk when you buy them with the same resources and the aim is to find an opportunity to stick the pointy end in hte other fellow? If one gives you a per turn increase in income which perpetuates into increased output of both economic and military advantages, and the other only gives you the opportunity to sharpen that pointy stick, the only time it makes sense to grab that pointier stick is when you know you are about to employ it.

The corollory of that applied to your question, is that the trunk is always invested into, but you only want the leaves once. When you start making it more complicated (oh tourism!) it stops being a tree and becomes a swamp that sucks down any meaningful decision, and it's mostly number crunching IMO.

[Bacchus]

Timing would be key, exactly -- judging whether the leaves give you the right boost just at the moment to win some local contest at the price of a slower overall snowball. The bonuses don't have to be limited to military, you could as well be stacking additional multipliers on "forges" at the cost of not advancing towards "factories".

The key conceptual difference would be that the trunk gives you access to qualitatively better stuff and better global stuff by satisfying prerequisites in seemingly unrelated field (music for miltrad), whilst leaves give a quantitative improvement and are not prerequisites for anything else. They are kinda like military -- normally you'd rather invest resourcea elsewhere for long-term development, but the situation forces you to address short-term threats or gives opportunities for massive gains from exploiting an opponent's weakness, so you build military. When and how much military to build makes for some interesting decision, when and how many leaves to research can work similarly, I feel.

Tourism was more of a joke

[rho21]

The tech system of the original Master of Orion might be worth considering.
Summary:

• There are 6 fields (e.g. weapons, electronics) in which you advance, one tech at a time.
  
• In each field, techs are grouped into rungs; you need at least one tech from a rung to be able to research techs from the next rung.
  
• Most techs are minor improvements on techs from a lower rung (e.g. neutron blasters are a more powerful beam weapon than lasers).
  
• Not all techs are available to research in any given game, it is decided randomly per race at game start.
  

It's far from identical, but your question made me think of two features of MOO's system:

• The way that techs are often incremental improvements (ship range is 3, 4, 5, ...; factories cost 10, 9, 8, ...) means a small difference between players in capabilities rather than a binary one.
  
• Once you have researched one tech in a rung, you can continue with other techs in that rung for a quick boost, or push on to the next rung to unlock more powerful techs sooner.
  

[Krill]

In some respects, what you are talking about already exists in some fashion in civ 4 (don't know of other games) inasmuch that civics, buildings and wonders provide methods of making units stronger via more XP.

Putting those kind of effects onto a side tech tree (essentially turning what are 2D tech trees into 3D tech trees, with the new dimension not interacting with the rest of the tech tree) would IMO increase the complexityy of the tech tree exponentially. I do feel that is not a problem per se, but it's worth noting that in 4X games alot of hte complexities come from simple systems interacting, and when designers try to make the individual systems themselves complex, it makes games increasingly difficult to understand and that can break enjoyment for people: just look at how we view games being dumbed down for the masses and how they view games like CIV. The system you talk about is not a complex system, but would IMO need to be designed to be simple to understand.

[Bacchus]

The tech system of the original Master of Orion might be worth considering.
Summary:

• There are 6 fields (e.g. weapons, electronics) in which you advance, one tech at a time.
  
• In each field, techs are grouped into rungs; you need at least one tech from a rung to be able to research techs from the next rung.
  
• Most techs are minor improvements on techs from a lower rung (e.g. neutron blasters are a more powerful beam weapon than lasers).
  
• Not all techs are available to research in any given game, it is decided randomly per race at game start.
  

It's far from identical, but your question made me think of two features of MOO's system:

• The way that techs are often incremental improvements (ship range is 3, 4, 5, ...; factories cost 10, 9, 8, ...) means a small difference between players in capabilities rather than a binary one.
  
• Once you have researched one tech in a rung, you can continue with other techs in that rung for a quick boost, or push on to the next rung to unlock more powerful techs sooner.
  

Thanks! I had a loose memory of MOO or some other space strategy adopting something like this approach.

[haphazard1]

The cost ratio of leaf techs to trunk techs would be pretty important to making such a system work, I think. Considering the MOO example, tech costs climbed dramatically from rung to rung. So you could grab another tech within the same rung fairly quickly, but gain (usually) fairly limited benefits, or you could spend a lot more research to climb to the next rung and get (usually) a significantly larger benefit.

Sometimes you could get a very large benefit within the same rung, if your tech "tree" (really more a set of parallel ladders) had a gap in a previous rung. But usually if you had such a gap (no beam weapons, for example, or no waste clean up tech, or whatever) then you would have selected the relevant tech to address that when you first choose to advance to that rung. But if you had multiple gaps, it could happen.

Another factor in MOO for the "next rung vs. same rung" choice was that every tech boosted your overall tech level in that field by one, no matter how cheap or "obsolete" the tech. And your overall tech level affected the cost and miniaturization of anything using that tech, so there was a bonus in cost savings and ship design savings for "completeness" within a tech field. Which sort of fits with your leaf idea -- that additional inventment within a field provides incremental gains, compared to going for the next rung and unlocking something entirely new.

[Sareln]

Did you ever play Victoria 2? Their tech system, each technology had inventions associated with it, and those inventions would randomly unlock (with +% chances for various synergies etc) over time after you achieved the technology. This meant that it was good to rush certain things but you couldn't systemize it to the point of a tech build-order, since you would end up moving in ways to exploit what did unlock in good time.

[antisocialmunky]

The best example I can think of is Endless Legend. That game has tech levels and you have to research some % of techs in each level to advance iirc. Moo2 had the miniaturization system so the further you researched into a tree, the smaller the ship parts from previous tech levels in that field had.

In the 4x I was designing, each tech was split into at most 3 different things. You only needed to research 1 thing to consider the tech 'researched' but you could also spend time researching the other techs in it to get all the perks. So to use a Civ4 example, instead of researching iron working and getting the swords and the ability to clear jungle you'd research swords or the ability to clear jungle and then have the option of continuing or getting both bonuses. This allows you to plot more optimal tech paths and lets you have more situational tech bonuses. I also toyed with the idea of unlocking additional tech bonuses by quest given when you unlock a tech kinda like oxford or wall street.

[SevenSpirits]

In some respects, what you are talking about already exists in some fashion in civ 4 (don't know of other games) inasmuch that civics, buildings and wonders provide methods of making units stronger via more XP.

Putting those kind of effects onto a side tech tree (essentially turning what are 2D tech trees into 3D tech trees, with the new dimension not interacting with the rest of the tech tree) would IMO increase the complexityy of the tech tree exponentially. I do feel that is not a problem per se, but it's worth noting that in 4X games alot of hte complexities come from simple systems interacting, and when designers try to make the individual systems themselves complex, it makes games increasingly difficult to understand and that can break enjoyment for people: just look at how we view games being dumbed down for the masses and how they view games like CIV. The system you talk about is not a complex system, but would IMO need to be designed to be simple to understand.

I would say that Civ IV already has a bit of it in that Archery is a level 2 version of Hunting.

I don't see any inherent problem with some "techs" not leading to other techs. I suspect the reason they moved away from that in Civ games is it's easier to balance - if literally every tech in the tree is required to make progress, then you won't end up with techs you never research.