Sorry for another thread about techs, but I think this is a very important and potentially game-harming issue that needs to be addressed ASAP.
We all remember GalCiv 2, where every new weapon/engine tech researched called for a manual upgrade of each custom ship the player designed. Whle Gal Civ 2 is a great 4X game, this was a serious blight upon its awesomeness (even with automatic upgrading).
What I'm asking for in Elemental is this: no upgraded versions of weapons derived from the same natural resources with drawbacks when compared with older versions of said weapons. Verbose, but bear with me for a moment.
So, let's say there's a tech for creating bronze swords. Using the Gal Civ system, and upgraded version of bronze swords (let's call it triple-folded bronze swords) would be more powerful but cost more money and time. Nine out of ten times, you will simply pay the extra money and take the added power, but that one time out of ten that you don't requires that each unit be situationally redesigned to either use the triple-folded bronze swords or stay with the old version of bronze swords. This is cumbersome. What I am proposing is that in the case that there really have to be upgraded versions of the same type of sword that there are no drawbacks to the new version. All future versions of a unit using that type of sword will carry the upgraded version of that sword. So all new bronze swordsmen, after the triple-folding upgrade, will have triple-folded bronze swords at no additional training-time cost.
Before you cry foul, however, hear me out. Equiping your swordsmen with steel swords, for example, could carry drawbacks as well as added power. So a "steel swordsman" could be a fundamentally different character than a "bronze swordsman," with drawbacks such as higher training time to use the advanced weapon or whatever, or the designers could decide that steel is better in every way than bronze and if you have the resources you will always want to equip your swordsmen with steel.
To reiterate, what I am trying to avoid is: a weapon that uses the same natural resources costing a different amount based on tech level.
I doubt many people here want to redesign their basic guard every time a new type of iron sword is researched, and have to adjust back in case of pressing circumstances. Managing your different resources is fun, but trying to weigh whether an extra turn of training time is worth the +1 attack is bean counting; it is 4X at its worst.
Of course, if the "sophisticated" economic model (camp #1 I believe) were used, and bronze swords themselves were resources, then there would be no need for this rant, because each type of bronze sword would be separately created from the unit.
Please feel free to post your suggestions and I will try to edit this post with some of them.
I like this.
Continually redesigning units as new revisions of existing technologies come out is really tedious. It happened in Master of Orion, Space Empires, and Gal Civ 2. And I did not like it when more advanced versions of a specific item became more expensive, because that alone forced the design process to keep ancient versions of the technology available - in Space Empires IV, for example, the late game design process becomes horribly cluttered with obsolete technologies because the new revisions were often not strictly better than the old ones. In GC2, much of the time a new technology came out, it was functionally identical to the old one except slightly more expensive, so that redesigning a ship to use (for example) fuel tanks v2 would give you absolutely no improvement (except for a tiny bit more unusable free space), and increase the cost.
Even World of Warcraft suffers this problem. In the late game, due to +heal items, healers used to (and maybe still do) use obsolete healing spells instead of the latest stuff because it was more mana-efficient ("downranking"). That was really an artifact of bad game design... and so was Blizzard's solution, to blanket-nerf the efficiency of older spells. But regardless, when you put effort into some area and earn a new, "improved" revision of something you already had - whether in an RPG or strategy game - it doesn't feel pleasant for it to have major and fundamental drawbacks.
In another example, Nox, I quit ~60% of the way through. My old equipment was no longer good enough to survive with, but the cool new gear I had found was simply too expensive to keep repaired; I felt cheated. Upgrading stuff - at great effort - should not make you end up worse.
So going from Ion Engines to Antimatter Engines might have pluses and minuses, and going from Heal to Flash Heal might have pluses and minuses; that's fair enough. But for the transition from Ion Engines v3 to Ion Engines v4, or from Heal III to Heal IV to have fundamental drawbacks? Just seems annoying and overly-complicated, in my opinion, and takes some of the fun and excitement out of the achievement. And the ability to specify a unit once, and not have to break your focus and plod through design UI with every single marginal advance, is priceless.
It has been stated that the research system should be very different from GalCiv 2 in that there are no "Super swords" or anything of the sort that might require a new unit to be designed. Once you have the "broadsword" unlocked, you get units with broadswards. And if you upgrade to a better broadsword tech, all units are automatically upgraded, or upgraded as soon as a shipment arrives to them (if they are already trained and it turns out that is the model they decide upon).
Removing the tedium of designing new units a la GalCiv 2 MUST be done!
It can also make non TBS people play Elemental just like non-adventure people gotted Resident Evil 4 & 5 and non-RPG people gotted Elder Scrolls 4 and Fallout 3.
(@Landisaurus) How dare you make a great post obsolete!
Haha SaberCherry, I think the post being obsolete is the best of all outcomes. Can we get a Stardock dev to confirm this if time permits?
If we can automate this updating when we want and avoiit when we want I will be one happy camper.
As of now, it is planned that the discovery of similar equipment types will yeild automatic upgrades for units using that item. However, if you unlock a new Axe and all units are using spears, you'll need to manually upgrade that unit type (if desired).
I disagree with the idea of "removing of old technologies" from what you can build. I agree it was sometimes unpleasant to upgrade older units like the existing ships in GC2, however automatic upgrade of all weapons is not good. If you have a sword and you invent a doublebladed sword, the old swords will never become the doublebladed ones. If you want all your units to have the new weapons, you need to pay for it and it may cost you a lot if you have lots of units.
It was the same in GCII. I often use older technologies, because they are cheaper and had the same attack/defense value as the new ones. However on big ships - there is a difference if you have 10 lasers on your ship or 13. So the size was important too. But not allways and the decision if it is or it is not the right time to upgrade is the matter of the strategy.
There must be however a good user interface for upgrading units to the new ones. I found very usefull the interface in GCII (upgrade of the existing type).
Pros:
1) if you choose the base class, the production of all planets is changed from the old design to the new one.I do hope it will be implemented in Elemental too.
2) you could upgrade all ships of the given class to the new one.
Cons:
1) if I have let us say 30 lasers on a ship, I have to remove them all and than place the new weapons on their positions. It would be great if there was a tool that would change old lasers with a new ones and I could only place new things.
2) it was easy to upgrade a single ship in space, however upgrading of ships of some type in a fleet is tedious.
I don't think the point 1 of the cons applies to Elemental. The number of swords a soldier carries is limited. However it may be useful if you don't design "a soldier" but "a squad". In that case it may be important. Such squad could contain let us say "30 bronze shortsword, 1 war drum (increases morale), 4 pikes and one field kitchen).
Auto-upgrades would be from Bronze Sword I to Bronze Sword II.
OK. However the question is: Will bronze sword I become a bronze sword II for no cost? For new units it is OK. For the old ones it is not OK. Is the upgrade the upgrade of a soldier or a squad?
I would be against any type of auto upgrade because it is unrealistic, if such an argument has any validity in a fantasy game. If you make your bronze sword 'double folded' for your unit then later discover 'triple folded bronze swords' the old unit still has the old swords. If you want the new ones you have to make the new ones, and that costs time and resources. The better sword probably takes more time and resources than the old one, so an auto-upgrade of existing units is unrealiztic. Players would be tempted to make cheap units while researching new weapon types to get the more expensive weapons free in an upgrade...if that was how it was implemented.
I would prefer that units have the weapons they were trined with. If you want to upgrade them to a new type, or a better version of an old type, then you need to make the new weapons and give them to the unit. The old weapons would then be in your warehouse to give to less important units, home guards perhaps.
I would assume there is a cost.
A footsoldier with a Bronze I sword and wooden shield learns the happy news he is getting the Bronze sword II and the metal shield. Much superior to the old. They still have to be created. A weaponsmith and all would have the work to do.
Even if you recylce the old weapons to be used as raw materials, there would be a cost.
Maybe there could be a user config option to not upgrade units if you wish.
or an automatic upgrade button that u click pick pay and get the new swords
I think that the idea of a checkbox labeled 'keep up to date' is the best so far, because the vast majority of technological changes in that era were ways of making superior goods for the same amount of work, so it's not like making a unit with less advanced weaponry would necessarily make it cheaper. I think that the auto-upgrading should be on the commodity level if the intricate economic system is used, that is, make all newly produced items of a type automatically be the most advanced type. That said, I think there are two resupply orders that need to be available, firstly prioritization so that you can get your best troops the finest gear you have as soon as you can because of their crucial role, and secondly being able to specify you don't want to have that unit recieve upgrades so you don't waste good swords on a unit that'll never need them. However, if your warehouses are overflowing, I do wonder if some equipment should be forced on units not set to keep up to date simply because the weapons will get thrown out anyway. That depends on the economic system, though.
Thanks for the response BoogieBac, that sounds exactly what I was hoping for. Elemental sounds better with every post I read!
I'm a big fan of the auto upgrade from Bronze Sword I to Bronze Sword II and the change from Short Sword to Long sword being manual.
Sammual
Agreed
Thanks for the info BoggieBac!
This sounds good! How complex is the changing process I wonder? If I suddenly want my entire spear army to wield axes for whatever reason, do i have to take them to a well developed city and upgrade or just throw some gold at them and call it a day?
endofdayz, I assume you will have to use whatever resources creating axes requires, not simply gold. A turn of retraining or two would probably be necessary as well.
What sort of weapons do you have?
[...]
While a game, especially a fantasy game, should always strive to be as internally consistant and realistic as possible, adhering to it's own lore and setting, when in conflict, gameplay must always trump whatever makes sense.
I have two thoughts.
1> There should generally be a reason not to upgrade. In other words, older techs should still have some advantage over newer techs - if nothing but cost. Perhaps each technology continue to get an in-type upgrade that makes it continually get smaller/cheaper/more efficient to the point that it always remains usable. That's the one thing I always hated about Gal Civ. Once a new technology became available there was no reason to use the older technology.
2> Upgrading existing units is important. It should be easy and very cost effective. Either that or you can't upgrade at all. That way, every player has to find a use for older units.
What about making the resources for older weapons more common than the ones required for newer ones? Frogboy said that having control of more than one of a resources makes things that use it build faster. With resources more common for lower level weapons, units that use them would build faster as players would have more of them under their control.
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