[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Random suggestion on advance costs

[Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Mar 09, 2000 at 10:11:20AM +0100, Reinier Post was heard to say:
> On Wed, Mar 08, 2000 at 02:04:30PM -0500, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> > turns needed for a scientific advance be an intrinsic property of the 
> > advance
> > itself? (rather than depending on how many advances the player has gotten)
> 
> Agreed, this seems more natural than the present system.  It looks like
> this is the system Civ must have started out with before playtesting
> :-)

  Yep :)

> >   We could set the costs explicitly, or calculate them automagically..
> > [...] I think a reasonable heuristic is for the cost of a
> > tech to vary according to the number of other techs that it depends on; the
> > increase could be linear (+100 bulbs for each dependency) or exponential
> 
> Yes, that's interesting.  But
> 
> > However, it would also make it more difficult to acquire advanced technology
> > in the extremely early stages of the game by means of very focused research
> 
> this is a definite drawback!

  I'm not sure.  I think that as things stand, doing this is too easy.  But
we've already determined that I don't know much about game strategies, so I'll
yield to your opinion :)

[snip]
> Now in my experience, if you really want to beat the best in this game
> it's a head-to-head race for the best wonders and some of the good units,
> so the realistic choice of tech paths is very limited already.

  True.  I still think we should encourage more diverse tech paths, but this
may not be a way to do it.  (it's still weird to see that, eg, the Wheel is
harder to research than electricity, but probably not especially harmful :) )

  Daniel

-- 
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed.