I think it is to early to make a dissension on this point.  Primary because the players starting at war really makes the ages feel stifling, once the game is more fleshed out, we can better balance the ages. But I am reluctant to just pull them, as they are a great way to help differentiate races, and help keep the the pace of the game feeling right. I think we can balance them to feel more natural.

That said, I am open to a game play option that disables them, or even pulling them if we cant make them work to our satisfaction. So keep the feedback coming. A great deal of design is balance, and tuning, and we have allot of that ahead of us still.   


 

Thank you, I love your response and your reaction.

I'll let you know a few months from now if its a real problem, and I'll try coming up with a creative alternative in my little dreamer head.

Again, you said something that was fair and Sovereign so thanks Paul! +1

DARCA

It seems like a really easy issue to me.  The developers may or may not have reasons we do not yet understand for tech ages.  Also, some people like them.  So, taking them out would suck.  Some people hate them.  So, leaving them in isn't ideal either.

Add a checkbox on game setup (e.g. Game Settings > Advanced Settings) for "Enforce Tech Ages".  The developers pick the default setting (assume enabled). If you uncheck the option, it lets you research without the age restrictions.  The only real ugliness from a code perspective that I see is will the AI adapt accordingly (or does it even need to)?

Play it and tell us how it affects the game.  That will be informative and productive. and add some new points to the discussion.

Europa Universalis gives you an ahead of time tech penalty.  It cost more of what is the equivalent to research points to get a tech early but you can do it. 

Well, remember that the Ages are an abstraction for many detailed restrictions.  From a game-balance perspective, your actual choices are the following two:

1. A simple tech tree, with Ages
2. A tech graph, with wide branching factor, many more dependencies, and rules (but no Ages)

You can't just discard the Ages and keep the same simple tree.  That's surely broken, and the tree was never designed to allow it.

It sounds like you'd be willing to accept option #2, and just play on the complex graph.  (I might be interested in that myself!)  Then you could probe all kinds of unbalanced strategies.  Chess calls these "gambits" or unsound piece sacs, and yah they can win if the other guy blinks.  However, balancing that well is a game-design nightmare.  Given that Stardock is already swamped with dev work for 7+ months (and 7+ years after official release), I don't blame them for making a director's-level judgment call that they shall appeal to the masses first, and fry bigger fish.

Remember that most players aren't us.  Less hardcore players would probably just be lost in a graph.  Your Diplomacy-heavy strategy already reflects some expertise in knowing all tech paths, and calculating that you can outrace them all anyways.  Let's not appeal from our expertise that we need more help to make us even more expert than the noobs.

Finally, keep in mind that Paul has GC3 DLCs mapped out to 2021(!!).  Surely within GC3's loooooong lifespan, somebody (maybe Stardock themselves) will publish an Ageless variant with the hardcore tech graph, and it'll be pretty well balanced (or converge to it).  It's not so hard to envision: just make yourself a nifty graph-based UI, bang out all of the links between techs, maybe add a couple of game engine hooks to apply penalty policies, and let players gamble on gambits.  I would love to see (or invent) that myself: then we can drag the 4X community across an epochal boundary, from the Epoch of Trees to the Era of Graphs.  Then we'll branch out into RPGs (you level-up to advance in a skill graph), 3D modeling (boundary representation is a graph :)), and web forum badges (you must earn points in multiple sub-forums to advance up a badge graph).  It'll blow adults' minds (when all kids know this).

For GC3 initial release, though ... the Ages mechanism is probably set in stone.  If you judge it on its (apparent) design goals of:

• being simple to grasp (for newbies and broad market appeal);
• simplifying (abstracting) the graph to a tree; and
• enabling customization (of races)

then it really is quite an elegant mechanism.  (Corollary: Your arguments based on gameplay alone have just been trumped by the Marketing Department.  Grin and bear it, it's happened to most of us.)

No.

No.

You can't make everything an option, or it becomes too confusing.

Idea:

Ages to me should be a global thing, not a racial thing.  Maybe heading into a new age speeds up the tech rate, and adds more anomalies, and allows catch-up on previous age techs much more quickly. 

Ahh, you are from somewhere that opposes critical thinking. Good to know, it answers a lot of questions.

I was not nitpicking, but trying to wade through your hyperbole to get to the real issue. In a truly open research format there would be no tree, and you could research any tech you want at any time with no prerequisites. So I'm just trying to figure out, given the fact that research is going to be limited in some way, what it is specifically about the way they are currently limiting research that bugs you. Then we can have a productive discussion that takes into consideration the goals and advantages of the tech ages as well as their limitations.

Dude no one ever talked about a completely open tech tree but you. The tree is currently obviously restrained by the ages, I want the previous normal restraints back like other people do, ok?!

Anywho I'm going to keep a tech log and play a entire game again and then play without so everyone can see the difference. It will show what I researched how long it takes to complete...this might take a while.

DARCA.

I liked the way research worked in GC2, you could research the next-level of any tech whenever you wanted/needed to.

I'm not ready to write-off the new tech tree with it's "ages" yet but it does make game-play more complex because of the sheer volume of techs there are to research, especially when the Branch-Headings are somewhat of a misnomer e.g. having Economic techs within the Governance section or having Production and Research techs within the same strand; the only branch that is clearly labelled is "War".  Probably what I would find simpler would be to have more "main Branches" [which is probably impractical now even though it's only Beta1+] labelled as simply as they were in GC2, although that would probably insult the devs egotistical desires to create something new, shiny and impressive.

It's not that I have a problem with "Tech-Ages", they seem more irrelevant than anything else;  what bothers me more is the cost and therefore the time required to research any tech, it's much too long in the early game.  Or it is for my standard strategy of researching to build infrastructure for not only production but also wealth, research and approval so that planets are productive in all senses and meanings of the word, to become a fully-active planet that's capable of Gearing up for war, trade and who-knows-what (Piracy/Spying-Espionage).  I am not totally averse to specialization but I'm never really happy about putting 'all of my eggs in 1 basket' tactics.  Talking of 'eggs', Food seems much more important now than it was in GC2.

I was so disenchanted with research timescales that I started a new game in "God-mode" [cheating with the Tech "unlock" feature from the bug-console].  It enabled me to play with the 'Terraforming' techs, and even with their inconsistent results, it was good to be able to turn 4-tile abominations into almost useful 10 or 12 hex planets with upgraded infrastructure, especially now that everything upgrades correctly from the latest patch.  However I did find the game too easy, being able to build Paladins and Overlords and more to decimate any opposition.

Anyway, the "Tech Ages" currently don't seem to add to or detract anything from the game but something nags me to say that crossing each barrier should add something fun or some reward to the game, a global increase in Research Ability perhaps or something, yet possibly only when all previous era techs have been completed ( from the hard slog to do so ).

If anything the rate of tech progression feels TOO FAST Post age of expansion. Once I get to AGE of WAR things seem to research MUCH faster. It would feel better if we unlocked expansion techs (slightly) faster and when Age of War is unlocked you to a Movie/something to say GRATS  you are now ready to crush your enemies. Then the progression lengthens out a bit more and finally the last age should also take longer than the previous first two. 

Just my 2 bits. 

The tech ages have a purpose and I don't want to see it disappeared. The game will be easier if you can max one tree straight from the beginning.

For me tech ages serve 2 functions when compared to the system we saw in GC2:

1) Prevent certain cheese tactics that result from over-specialization.

2) Reinforce the natural structure of most games (the race for colonization, conflict brought on by the lack of remaining habitable planets, and the push to victory).

The default for the developers would be to stick to the GC2 model, so the fact that they didn't shows that they thought it needed improvement. I think any discussion of removing tech ages should include ways to improve the shortcomings of the GC2 trees.

It just doesn't seem right that the ages are defined by the player.   Age should be a global thing, that's how it is in the history books.

Being the first to get into a new age should bring some benefits, maybe in terms of defining the age itself (or a bonus to something in that age)

It does smack a bit of new eras in Civ, though those weren't as limiting.

If you want to discourage beelining- maybe have it where once one race reaches the next age, the previous age's techs become very cheap to discover, and an ahead of time tech penalty for pushing too far without having the necessary techs discovered? 

Now strategy is being called bee-lining. :/