After the Cataclysm, much of the accrued knowledge of the world was lost. One of your priorities will be to find scholars who can recover this lost knowledge.
Elemental doesn’t have a traditional technology tree. Instead, it has 5 research categories (the Kingdoms and the Empires have different categories). When enough research has been done, a breakthru in that category is made and the player is presented with possible technologies to learn at that point.
When choosing a category, a given technology is color coded (green, yellow, red). Green means that technology will be available upon the breakthru being made. Yellow means it might be available. Red means it will possibly be available. In addition, there are certain technologies that are so rare that they are not displayed until the time of the breakthru.
Each new level of a given category takes more research to achieve than the previous. Hence, players have to be mindful of what technology they choose, particularly when deciding whether to pick up a rare technology that becomes available.
Acquiring Knowledge
There are two primary ways of acquiring knowledge in Elemental. The first way is to construct improvements to your city that attract scholars. The second is to actually recruit famous scholars, inventors and other specialists as you find them.
Constructing Studies
Recruiting NPCs
Was anything ever decided on the idea of a technology greying out and possibly being learned as a bonus tech?
Is a +2 bonus to research big or small? How many research points per turn is a lot? Assuming +2 is small, will there be NPC's that give bigger bonuses later in the game?
There are certain technologies that are extremely rare (gray techs) or can only be learned from NPCs. Most people won't encounter all the techs in the game for months of playing (and really, probably years since we plan to keep adding more techs after release with updates and not tell anyone).
You'll just have to play.
Fair enough, I guess
The adding techs without telling anyone is both awesome and diabolical at the same time. I bet there will be lots of posts on the forums along the lines of "Where did that tech come from? I've never seen it before"
How will tech balance with size of empire? Namely, if I have the largest empire will I automatically be the most technologically advanced by dint of the number of research buildings I can build? Or is it possible for smaller empires to stay relatively even without too much trouble?
That´s awesome, but won't we be able to tell from the .xml files? And it could be sweet to tie in some achievements to these techs.
Are these people, such as Viy and Myriam, randomly generated each game?
More importantly, does it scale? I imagine +2 research points will be worth much more early on and then diminish as your cities become more numerous and more developed. Will the bonuses provided by champions scale with level, or something? It'd be kind of unfortunate for one of the major aspects of champions to diminish over time; it'd be much cooler if they grow along with the rest of your kingdom and sovereign.
That is amazing. So amazing, in fact, that I'd love to see stealth patches including other minor things too! A new spell here, new technology there, new quest here...
I like the research system in Elemental, I think it's fun and original. I don't know any other game that has a similar one.
An interface improvement suggestion: I see that the current level and research time are displayed only for the selected category, I think they should be visible for all categories, so you don't have to click on them to find it out.
No. Which NPCs are in a given game is randomly decided but we don't randomly generate them. Each character appears in the Hiergamenon.
Hiergamenon.
Can we get a pronuncation on that please?
I'm a bit worried about the balance of categories: does the "diplomacy" category contain so important techs that it's comparable to the "civilization" category?
excellent! i am so excited!
Hiergamenon - Def: We made it up! Pronounced - Hare-gam-anon. (just remember- they made it up) LOL
Wouldn't it be pronounced High-er-gam-en-on?
Frogboy please take a look at this thread if you haven't already... There's some really good ideas for technology in there...
The prefix heir is tough to break out. Instead of Hare/Hair- it may be more like Air-gam-anon or Air-gam- a- non perhaps.
It wasn't in any dictionary I checked.
Oh cool, will you sneak in other things as well such as new quests and the like? Maybe even mix in high rated player-created content?
The more tech the better!
If I can reach 5000 turns and still have stuff to research I'll consider that impressive.
Stay away from MP then. No way in hell will you last 5K Turns in a MP Match against me. (challenged)
i asked this in another thread but i think its more appropriate here.
will you be able to get special technologies that can only be found by doing quests? such as going down into a deep dark dungeon only to stumble upon an old dusty library that has a book on X?
Wow lots of journals today! Thank You!
Tons of research = tons of fun! If we can't get all the research in a long game = WIN!
May I suggest that rare techs be something other than gray? Gray tends to imply an option is disabled in a UI. Perhaps a gold color that would really stand out as something special.
i have to concur with malex. if its that rare and special we need a color that pops.
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