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?