Not in real life, of course, it’s way to slow there (Why am I not a robot yet?). But it’s something I’ve been thinking about for awhile in 4X games, and the slower-paced RTSes (i.e. those which have parallels to 4Xs rather than to speedily-resolved conflicts such as those in Command & Conquer or StarCraft).
Here’s the thing I find happens all too often, from Age of Empires to Civilization to GalCiv: I research some shiny new tech, I crank out new units that make use of it, and then by the time they get to the front line… I’ve researched something better. And I hate to throw things into the fight when I can give them a better chance at victory, so I pull them back, upgrade, send them in – and the same thing happens.
Now partly this is my own fault. I identify, quite outside of videogames, technology as being perhaps the single most important factor of human civilization; naturally this attitude transfers into games when I play them, and given how most games which involve any kind of research can be thoroughly dependent on it if you want to win, the attitude is encouraged. Better units, better buildings, new wonders, more options in general.
But in these games, things tend to come along too fast for you to keep up with it all. This isn’t terribly accurate to real life; we might suspend production of our appliances during a war or depression or something, but once those are past, the evidence is that the public explodes with eagerness for new technologies like the radio or TV. Technologies are interlinked, often in a hugely complicated way, and games don’t come close to handling this complexity in a satisfying way. At best you’ll get a research bonus to tech X if you’ve researched tech D first. I hope that someone can put together a broader and deeper sense of technological development, one where you don’t always have control (As with SMAC’s blind research), and one where you have enough time to make use of your things before new units surpass them. This would both make development more rewarding and would probably serve to equalize things slightly, as a big tech lead would be harder to get.
Do you guys know of any games that do tech advancement in interesting ways? Do you know of games which just have insanely huge tech trees?
I’ve never encountered this type of problem in 4x or RTS games, primarily because my strategy is always centralized around a particular tech unit or tech tier.
In RTS, it’s a lot easier to stay within that tech tier, since tech trees tend to be simplified, and thus require more resource/strategic investment in advancing beyond the initial planned point. It’s way too easy to fall into this tier trap in Starcraft 2 in intermediate-level play, since reasonable macromanagement tends to restrict tech due to emphasis on keeping all unit-producing structures active and keeping available resources as low as possible. It takes a higher level of play to know when to eschew production in favor of tech advancement or expansion, both of which requiring a significant resource investment.
In 4x as you said, tech tends to move through tiers really quickly, since tech advancement generally doesn’t use up the same resources as unit production (at least, not at the same level as RTS games such as starcraft). But since I’m a less seasoned player in this genre, having only played Civ 5, I can only say that my strategy more or less involves rushing towards a pre-determined tech, heavily investing in that tech unit, and then wait until another pre-determined tech (often a few tiers later) to switch up if necessary. But since I’m usually against easy/normal AI, the strategy tends to pay off after the initial rush anyway. I’m always like this with Chu-Ko-Nu/Landsknecht/Samurai. Medieval rush FTW.