Yo dawgs.
It just suddenly came to me in a flash of inspiration; the alignment trees need to be limited in a way. Look at my mock-up of how they are currently;
(I'm a professional artist as you can see)
As it stands, you can select whatever you want from the trees so long as you have the requisite amount of points from random events and stuff, meaning that theoretically, you could have all three ideologies maxed out with no repercussions. This is bad because it means that those that specialize, or otherwise RP their civilizations will be put at an extreme disadvantage for not pursuing all three branches. Specialization should be rewarded, while generalists should be limited in some way to prevent them from out competing them.
In that vein, here's another picture;
Here, I've selected the first tier of "Good" options, and as a direct result, the last tiers of "Neutral" and "Evil" are crossed out and unavailable. In-universe, as my civilization grows more compassionate (or apathetic, or ruthless), the more extreme aspects of the other ideologies begin to conflict with my chosen path, meaning my people won't accept them. In-game, this means that players who generalize when it comes to ideologies can only select lower-level powers and abilities.
Here's more examples;
The second tier of "Good" is selected, and by extension, the other two are now locked-out.
Both the first tier of "Good" and "Evil" have been chosen, locking out neutral and the top-level options for both.
This is the best I can explain it without getting overly-verbose. I feel this would improve how players interact with the alignments in the game, and give incentives both to specialize (To get maximum benefits from a certain path) and generalize (To get more dilute bonuses over several trees). You can extend this over more layers if you wish; it works about the same.
What are your opinions on this?
An interesting viewpoint, one that I like as well. Whether the devs will pick up on it or not will be interesting to see.
meaning that theoretically, you could have all three ideologies maxed out with no repercussions
NOOO! NOT THAT!
IDC as long as I can undo the limitations suggested here. I think though the devs said you will likely have enough for one tree per game.
DARCA.
Hey, I like to old system! EVIL EVIL EVIL, then buy my way to salvation with credits! Slavery, torture, facehuggers on colonists for tech! All goodness then when Ethics are researched, bam, 50K in Credits and I am a saint! LOOOVE IT!
Ok well the current system is ok but I would like the exploration of my survey ships to have more options and give me more 'ethics' choices. When I investigate that space junk we found 'argon VI' and you can either A) use it on your crew (+10 to Malice) or jettison it into the nearest star (+10 Benevolence) ....or some such choices.
I just want more options other than having to get my points solely from Colonizing planets. Some like to build Tall and focus on a core set of planets and others like to build WiiiiDE and have lots of planets but poorly developed. I say lets cater to both tastes.
+ 2 coppers...
While i like the gamist idea of that and the effort you put into it, i wonder why you would want to hardcode that. If you want to RP your empire go for it, but dont restrain those, that dont want to RP or otherwise specialize.
"This is bad because it means that those that specialize, or otherwise RP their civilizations will be put at an extreme disadvantage for not pursuing all three branches. Specialization should be rewarded, while generalists should be limited in some way to prevent them from out competing them."
This is, why i mostly don't like when games start to cater to the multiplayer crowd. It starts to restrict singleplayer.
If you really want to be pure good / evil / neutral show the restrain neccesary to go that way, like you need to in real life. Resist temptation to branch into other trees and life with the consequences. I find that much more challenging than choosing a tree in early / mid game and just rolling along. Because that way you will loose any upcoming hard decission in later game.
But i am not a fan of 'balanced multiplayer' anyway, so you might want to ignore me on that.
Ideally there could be an option, but there are only so many options Stardock can fit
I wouldn't like people who like to branch out unduly-punished, but players (and AI) that focus on specific aspects of gameplay/ideology/technology/etc should be rewarded above and beyond what the person who pursues everything in their relevant field. My post is basically asking for trade-offs, as opposed to free choice; sometimes giving players too many options in a situation ends up diluting the mix, making it more bland and predictable imo.
Didn't Paul Boyer already address this in one of the dev streams? I think it was in the third one, but I would need to check first to be sure.
Edit: Yep, it was in the third one. First question answered, no less. Based on what Paul Boyer said, it doesn't sound like that big of an issue (or even that easily doable). At least, once everything they have planned is implemented.
When a game dev says "It shouldn't be an issue" when it comes to 'exploits', expect it to become an issue. :3
He didn't say "It shouldn't be an issue". That's just my interpretation.
In any case, you should take a few things into consideration:
1. We are currently in alpha. The amount of Ideology-points we can get at the moment is probably much higher than what it will be in the final game, just so we can test everything.
2. There will be more picks per tier.
3. Taking a pick increases the cost for the other Ideologies too. For example, unlocking your first pick requires 10 points. You acquire enough points to unlock your first pick in the Malevolent Ideology-tree. Unlocking your second pick will now cost 20 points, while unlocking your first pick in the Pragmatism and Benevolent Ideology-trees will also cost 20 points. Those are just some made-up values, but I think you can see where this is going. The more you specialise in one Ideology-tree, the harder it gets to unlock anything in the other trees. The more you spread around, the harder it gets to make progress in any tree.
I'll reserve judgement until the game is released, I try to make few assumptions, aside from my current "assume the worst"
I understand. I actually spent a few minutes working out the relatively simple details behind my idea, and it translates better into three tiers than the two shown.
I'm not a fan of soft caps on things; approval and population mechanics from GC2 still haunt me till this day, and they aren't done well in most TBS and RTS games in my (extensive) experience. More tangible, solid barriers tend to work much better.
Or you want this to be a problem to justify the making of this post. Or you are bored. Or you are a alien sent to disrupt our views on ideology for a mass effect invasion!
DARCA
I would suggest to make it part of his own research tree. My first draft would be that each step on the pyramid, seperate for each alignment, needs to be researched. Each research, no matter which step, cost double of that of the previous research in 'alignment research'.
i.e.
100R: Good 1 OR Neutral 1 OR Evil 1 -> say you chose Good 1
200R: Good 2 OR Neutral 1 OR Evil 1 -> say you chose Neutral 1
400R: Good 2 OR Neutral 2 OR Evil 1 -> etc. ...
In effect it would still be possible to achieve all steps of all alignments, but it would be a huge advantage to specialize.
And I'm not a fan of hard caps: "I'm going to build a huge trade network. My bank account will grow bigger and bigger, and I'll buy planets left and right. And there is nothing anyone can do to prevent it, because nobody will dare to declare war on me, for fear of ruining their economy. Mwuahahaha! What, I can only have 12 trade routes? Damn, foiled again!"
Seriously, what was up with that? Trade was already one of the weakest means of getting lots of money (unless you build lots of economy starbases to increase the trade income, but that has its own downsides), so why the additional hard cap on how many routes you can have?
The mechanic itself wasn't too bad. The problem was, that the devs kept nerfing morale and made the penalty for having a high population bigger and bigger. Back when I first starting playing, it was actually possible to reach the population hard cap of 100b. Can you believe that nowadays?
Ugh, don't remind me. I wonder what Stardock was thinking when they made the choice to hard code the number of trade routes Not to mention trade didn't scale at all! Ahhh!
But there will always be exceptions to any rule, and that's one of them.
For real? Like, you mean, 100 billion ? No exploits? No cheats?
Wow.
Meanwhile, I'm happy to hit 15 billion with 100% in Twilight
Yes, as long as your planet had enough space for all the improvements, you could do it. Granted, getting to the 100b still took a loooong time, even with ferrying people from one planet to the other. There was no Super Breeder that could help speed things up.
Personally, as far as the alignment tree goes, I would rather they made it so that you had to be 'leaning' at least so much in a certain direction along the good/evil axis for each set of unlocks in the good/evil trees (and for the neutral tree, you can be 'leaning' no more than so much in a certain direction), and have thresholds saying that you can't have more than X unlocks in the alignment trees until you have Yx total alignment points. Your 'leanings' could then be calculated as
((Good Points) - (Evil Points))/((Good Points) + (Evil Points) + (Neutral Points))
and you gain or lose access to alignment tree unlocks as your leaning changes. This is a fairly simple model that includes a little bit of 'historical inertia,' as it would be much harder to shift a society that's been choosing nothing but the 'Good' choices since turn 1 over to 'Evil' than it would be to shift a society that averages out to 'Neutral.' Any improvements unlocked by alignment tree techs could remain functioning but become irreplaceable (in that you can no longer build more of them) if you ceased to qualify for the unlock that granted them, at least until such time as your alignment shifts back enough to re-qualify for the unlock granting the improvement.
If you have seven unlockables in each alignment tree, you could then require that you have 10/20/40/80/150/250/400 'alignment points' total to unlock 1/2/3/4/5/6/7 items in an alignment tree, and attach leaning requirements to each of the unlocks, with higher-tier unlocks requiring more extreme leanings (in the case of the 'Neutral' tree, it would require your leanings to be less extreme rather than more extreme; if, for example, top tier good/evil unlocks required 90% leanings towards good/evil, then top-tier neutral unlocks might require that you lean no more than 10% in either direction). If your leanings changed, you'd lose any unlocks you no longer qualified for but would still be able to fill that slot with an alternative unlock that you do qualify for.
Note that the numbers proposed above are only examples, and I do not think that it would necessarily be bad for the number of slots you could open up to differ from the number of slots in any one alignment tree.
In my opinion, either the system I just proposed or ParagonRenegade's proposed system would be better than the current system which allows you to be both the nice guy who'd never consider harming even a fly and the jerk who enslaves alien children to work in the starship foundries. Regardless, I would settle for simply not being required to unlock something in an ethics tree when I qualify for an unlock in the current system. I also tend to oppose hardcoding whatever gets done.
I like the idea. One thing I will say though, is that at a certain point if you pursue Malice more than Benevolence and vice versa, it should lock you out of the other tree. After all they are complete opposites. It wouldn't make sense if you tried to pursue both Benevolence and Malice, because I think that would destabilize the hell out of a nation in real life (would be an interesting thing to see). I think both of the extremes can work with the Pragmatic choice, but only to a certain extent. For example, I prefer pursuing Pragmatism and having a bit of Malice on the side (maybe the first Benevolence, if you can get it). But once you go to the second tier of Pragmatism, and you go to the second tier of Malice or Benevolence, the other should be locked out completely.
Just some thoughts.
That's exactly what I was aiming for with this illustration. Good idea!
First, since the system is still very alpha, I think many aspects of ideology will change. I'm still reserving judgment.
I tend to agree that the ideology tree needs some form of limitation because of mutually exclusive ideologies that are, at present, equally easy to get (assuming they are on the same tier).
That said, the hard limits suggested in the OP might be a bit too limiting. I'd be okay if some were hard limited (those that are truly opposites), but I think most could be limited by making the point costs greater.
For example, every selection from the benevolent tree could increase the cost of the pragmatic tree's items by a certain percentage, and increase the cost of the malevolent tree's items by a greater percentage. The effect could also become more pronounced as a player accesses higher tiers (i.e. each selection from the benevolent tree's tier one affects pragmatic cost by +2.5% and malevolent cost by +5%; tier two selections by +5% and +10% respectively; tier three by +10% and +20%; tier four by +20% and +40%).
The more benevolent a society, the more expensive it is for that society to access pragmatic ideologies, and even more costly to access malevolent ideologies.
So for those who diversify, everything becomes more expensive. But for those who specialize, the cost follows its normal progression.
That's how it works already. Except, the cost increase is the same for all ideologies.
I know. That's what I meant by "the cost follows its normal progression."
Basically, what I'm suggesting is that the cost wouldn't increase equally.
For example, if you pick an ideology from tier one of the pragmatic tree, the pragmatic tree's cost would go up like normal, but the other two's costs would go up by slightly more.
If next you pick from the malevolent tree tier one (at the slightly higher cost relative to the pragmatic tree), the malevolent tree's cost would go up like normal, but the pragmatic tree's cost would go up a little more, and the benevolent tree's cost would go up slightly more than the pragmatic tree's.
The more you specialize, the costlier it becomes to gain the other ideologies.
And to go back to the OP, my idea is essentially a modified version of what ParagonRenegade is suggesting--but instead of locking items, I'm suggesting an increase to the cost.
If the cost difference is high enough, a player may be able to get most or all of the top tier perks from one ideology, but only one top-tier perk from another.
This makes spending points on a secondary ideology require a lot more selectivity, which I think would add more strategic possibility, greater differentiation between players, and more replayability.
Exactly! Maybe I wasn't clear enough in my last post, but that is what I meant with "That's how it works already."
The exception is, that, if you specialised in malevolent up to this point, switching to benevolent won't cost more than switching to pragmatism. They've become equally more expensive.
Have you actually tried climbing up multiple trees? Because I did and it became impractical fast. The game mechanic is balanced as it is. There is no real advantage in pursuing multiple trees. It becomes cost-prohibitive fast and you won't be able to reach the higher tiers without spending all your production building and destroying improvements that grant ideology on completion.
On current maps.
Future maps at release will have thousands of planets and anomalies with events attached. That's a no-go.
they can just make the cost increase scale with the map size or w/e. It's just a numbers game, set a amount of ideology choices you want a player to make during a normal game, and then magic the numbers around until you get that. As long as they don't balance the game around "medium map size, default settings" like some games do, it should be fine, especially since we can expect balance patches anyways.
with abit of luck there will be a "amount of ideology events: never, sometimes, normal, a lot" setting too in game creation. (hope they put in advanced game creation options like in civ5 with a bunch of obscure options you don't normally want)
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
