Re: [FT] Tech Trees

On Tue, Feb 05, 2002 at 04:50:35AM -0500, Thomas Barclay wrote:
>I've seen some people simulate older FT 
>designs (Dean G?)

Yes.

>using waste space. This is 
>fine if all you are simulating is dated tech across 
>the board. It sort of is a good generic way of 
>handling older designs, though it would have 
>been nice to see some % quantification on how 
>much more space you should use per year or 
>whatever to give an across the board fair use.

Agreed; not that we have precise years for most of the older designs
anyway. (Also see below on "Changing costs/masses".)

>OTOH, what if you're trying to simulate different 
>tech progressions? You have (as I see it) two 
>areas you can approach this from: Limiting 
>system types by "tech level" and affecting the 
>costs and or masses by the same degree. 

Limiting system types: this is fairly easy. I've seen campaign rules
which say "to develop system X, you must first have system Y"; in fact,
I'm planning to work on some of my own fairly soon.

Changing costs/masses: this gets harder. Not because it's a bad idea,
but because the mass/cost system is very granular; an FCS taking 2 mass 
rather than 1 is a huge penalty, and there's nothing in between.  
Similarly, one can't reduce the mass of an FCS without making it zero.

>As I recall in Stars!, the tech for shrinking things 
>was miniaturization and became very important 
>in a tech tight universe. 

(mutter mutter VGAPlanets ripoff mutter mutter :-)

>My main concern is I'd like to get something 
>that lets different nations progress at a very 
>slightly different rate in different tech areas, but 
>not enough so as to throw the whole shebang 
>so far off balance that one nation is 
>UberStrong. I find this a common flaw in tech 
>trees - once you figure out the advantageous 
>progress route or if you luckily get two or three 
>potentiating or synergistic advances (J.U.M.P. 
>into the Unknown comes to mind here), it 
>actually means you've got a huge advantage. 

Things I also want such a system to do, in no especial order:

(1) Don't allow mixed-tech ships (e.g. Stingers on a human ship), 
because I find them ugly and the rules would need to be seriously 
rewritten to balance them.

(2) Let resource allocation be the main factor in progress - do I
research beam-3s or build another battledreadnought?

(3) Be easy to program into my ship design software.

(4) Have multiple prerequisites for at least some items.

Any thoughts from elsewhere?