Research and Exchange of Ideas

RESEARCH

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In GW4, Research was split up into predefined trees and custom projects that would constitute "mid- to late-game research". In GW5, everything is custom from the start. To help guide the direction of Research and plot progression paths, there are two classifications:

1. Basic Research includes any idea, theory, or principle that helps define and manipulate the world, whether it falls under math, herblore, physics, or philosophy, or any other field. Also known as Knowledge.
   
2. Applied Research involves taking ideas, theories, and principles from Basic Research and creating objects that incorporate that knowledge. Also known as Technology.
   

That means that when you propose a research project, you must define which type it is. If you propose an Applied Research project, the GM will let you know what kind of Basic Research will be required.

There are nine fields under which Basic Research can fall; projects can be included in more than one field.

1. Math: The broadest and most useful field. Includes physics.
   
2. Life Science: Deals with plants and creatures. Includes herblore.
   
3. Engineering: More specific than math; used for buildings and machines.
   
4. Philosophy: Deals with human thought and speech.
   
5. Military Code: Includes with military training and doctrines.
   
6. Espionage: Involves stealth and communication concepts.
   
7. Summoning: The binding of spiritual creatures into physical forms.
   
8. Arcanics: Spellcrafting and all forms of purely magical theories.
   
9. Rune Physics: Focuses on the nature of runes and their applications.
   

Research projects are worked on by Professors; each Professor can only work on one project at a time, though more than one Professor can be assigned to the same project; doing so will increase its chance to succeed each stage. If one of your Professors changes his focus to another project, progress on the first one won't be lost.

Every project is split up into a number of stages, each with its own chance of success. Once a stage is completed, the project moves to the next one in order. All projects have at least two stages: Concept and Delivery. For most Basic Research projects, there's nothing else. For Applied Research projects, there's at least one stage in-between: the development of the physical object being researched. Depending on the complexity of Applied Research projects, many stages might be required. When the GM approves your project, he'll let you know how many stages there are and the chance (in a percentage) to succeed each stage.

EXCHANGE OF IDEAS
This concept was known as "trading techs" in GW4, but GW5 moves away from that terminology because "techs" are Applied Research projects.

All Research projects can be condensed into textbooks, schematics, etc. that can be delivered by any Agent, Caravan, or army. However, the receiving faction will require a number of seasons to learn and understand the project. If you send one of your Professors to teach them, they will learn it faster. However, that Professor can't work on his own project until he returns.

Bleh. I'm sure I'm missing some things, but I wanted to at least get the draft 90% complete so we can start playtesting tomorrow or Monday. Lime should be back, aye?

By the way, a player can focus more than a single professor into a project. If he does so, he can proceed through research faster. (Instead of one roll per turn, they get two if two professors are working on it, etc.)

Ah, good point. I'll add that in.

Alrighty then. Like I said, I think the problems with this much freedom will become clearer as we playtest. Sadly, we can't easily simulate 40 turns and a thread's worth of arguments.

I feel like there's no better way to do this: It's simple, it's effective, it rewards creativity, and it is a familiar system.

Jasband wrote:

Alrighty then. Like I said, I think the problems with this much freedom will become clearer as we playtest. Sadly, we can't easily simulate 40 turns and a thread's worth of arguments.

Well, guess who the fuck was right. We're not 2 turns in and Lime says he's overwhelmed by the complexity of the game, mainly research. William, I know you're all for player freedom and you ask yourself the question, "Who am I to stop playing X from doing Y?", but we need to set down some progression paths. Period. I don't want it to be as simplistic or limited as GW4, because I know that's TOO simple and limited. But we need to take another look at this.

I believe I said I wanted some exemplary progression paths very early on, but I guess it's been everyone procrastinating a lot and nobody actually doing them. I wanted to wait for the playtest to provide me with some ideas for good start-up techs so I can blatantly and shamelessly copy them for the final product.

Welp.

Now what.

If that's the process, then fine. We know that Metallurgy will be required before any Applied Research involving steel+ can be conducted. Another important thing to note is the idea of "established knowledge"; I think it's important for everyone to know exactly what they're starting with; for instance, Lime's knowledge of how to ride horses (Basic Riding) and how to shoot bows (Basic Archery) that he already possesses allow him to conduct the Applied Research of Horse Archers right away.

Disclaimer: Work boredom and mild dehydration contributed to this idea, so keep that in mind.

Problem: Basic research is too broad and players need a direction to be able to advance in, but research overall shouldn't be so simple that it's neatly packaged into trees.

Solution: Basic Field Levels!

Ok, it's nothing revolutionary, it's more like an attempt to standardize the knowledge each faction starts with and will require for Applied projects. First, we get rid of the fields and get a bit more specific:

1. Mining (or Stoneworking)
2. Smithing
3. Woodcutting
4. Fletching
5. Construction (or Carpentry/Woodworking)
6. Crafting
7. Arcanics
8. Rune Science (or whatever the field with runes was)
9. Herblore (or Chemistry)
10. Engineering
11. Speech
12. Stealth
13. Melee Combat
14. Ranged Combat
15. Religion
16. Riding

I'll add more as we think of them. For familiarity's sake, the  "fields" obviously share skill names.

Basically, each level in these fields would allow more complex Applied projects. Depending on how broadly we categorize knowledge (should be broad for some fields and pretty specific for others), each field will have a certain number of levels. Probably 1-8 for the most complex, no 99s here.

Example: Level 1 Smithing (it could have a friendly name, like Basic Metalworking) allows the forging and shaping of iron. Level 2 (Metallurgy) allows the forging and shaping of steel, etc. Level 1 Engineering would be far more broad, something like "knowledge of all basic machines and simple physics". As always, defining the levels in the fields will be the hardest part, but I still don't think it's impossible. Anything that's not included in the basic description can be arbitrarily assigned to a level by William based on relative complexity and/or hierarchy of components in the game (for instance, yew trees requiring higher Woodcutting than maple trees).

Everyone would start with level 1 in each field. When trading Applied technology that requires high levels in the Basic Fields, those levels will have to be learned before the Applied tech can be used.

Now it's raining buckets outside, so I'm gonna hide in Da Hut.

Do we get to name each of the levels like you did with the first few of smithing? :3

I'm kinda split on that... on the one hand, having friendly names will probably make the levels easier to remember, but they have to be pretty vague so as not to appear limiting or give false impressions of what they'll enable.

That's kind of what I was thinking of in some early concepts of the improved research thingy way back when we were talking about GW4 development. The idea was that we had like "Advanced Magic" research and then we'd drop 1-10 "stages" on it, and each "stage" would represent an advancement on the field. Now, the thing here was that you didn't need to progress linearly through the "stages". Like, you could have Advanced Magic 1, 3, and 6 without needing 2, 4 or 5. That would represent the different forms of advancement there are, like 6 is a completely separate breakthrough from 5. Each "stage" would offer benefits, like +10% magic damage, 5% cheaper major spells etc. An interesting aspect here would be that it would be possible to limit the "stages" obtainable by the player alone and give some of them exclusively to npcs.

Then I could always make some arbitrary, completely random requirements for players to have when they want applied magic research. "Oh, you can't do that without Advanced Magic 3, 9 and 10!" for instance.

Oh right, WAY too many fields. Who even wants woodcutting technologies?

Well, it's not too late to completely rework the fields if we cannot do anything with them at this time. We're really confused about how to go about Science in this game.

And here I was thinking you guys had it handled. It's strange you guys use the research system in the alpha correctly yet claim confusion.

More like getting overwhelmed.

Lord William wrote:

And here I was thinking you guys had it handled. It's strange you guys use the research system in the alpha correctly yet claim confusion.

Turn 1 isn't a great long-term indicator. The important thing about these levels is completion time/costs are still variable and it only applies to Basic.

Lord William wrote:

That's kind of what I was thinking of in some early concepts of the improved research thingy way back when we were talking about GW4 development. The idea was that we had like "Advanced Magic" research and then we'd drop 1-10 "stages" on it, and each "stage" would represent an advancement on the field. Now, the thing here was that you didn't need to progress linearly through the "stages". Like, you could have Advanced Magic 1, 3, and 6 without needing 2, 4 or 5. That would represent the different forms of advancement there are, like 6 is a completely separate breakthrough from 5. Each "stage" would offer benefits, like +10% magic damage, 5% cheaper major spells etc. An interesting aspect here would be that it would be possible to limit the "stages" obtainable by the player alone and give some of them exclusively to npcs.

Then I could always make some arbitrary, completely random requirements for players to have when they want applied magic research. "Oh, you can't do that without Advanced Magic 3, 9 and 10!" for instance.

Oh right, WAY too many fields. Who even wants woodcutting technologies?

For some reason, I didn't see this post until now @_@!

The only reason I want to progress linearly is because it's familiar. Yes, when describing the levels, especially in things like Herblore/Chemistry & Engineering, we'll have to arbitrarily say "X comes after Y", just like Jagex arbitrarily said "adamant is better than mithril, thus it requires higher levels to extract and work with". The only reason I want (potentially) a lot of fields is to cover all the bases of knowledge and theories - Basic research - or, at least, as many as will be applicable in this game. Looking at the alpha:

Lime's tech: It'd require level 1 Riding and Archery.
My tech: It'd need level 2 Smithing.

Let's say Siroki wants to improve the bows his Archers use, maybe better range + damage. It'd either require level 1 Woodcutting and level 2 Fletching (better techniques), level 2 WC (better wood) and level 2 Fletching, or level 2 WC and level 1 Fletching. That's arbitrary and up to the GM.

Let's say William wants to do something magical. Well, if it's something like an improved type of rune, it might only require level 1 Arcanics and Rune Science, but that's doubtful.

Having the progression be non-linear sort of defeats the purpose, though it would still go a long way to helping players determine exactly what kind of Applied projects they'll be able to eventually do. Basic research projects don't offer any direct bonuses when completed, so there's no need to worry about that.

Here's what I've got so far:

Melee Combat

Spoiler:

Ranged Combat

Spoiler:

Magical Combat

Spoiler:

Riding

Spoiler:

Engineering

Spoiler:

Let's see... What we have here is four EXEMPLARY basic research progression trees for one field, and then one for a second one. (Everyone got the numbers right? Good.) Now, a lot of these techs are redundant/impossible and wouldn't result in anything. For example, researching "additional" weapon types helps you in no way, since it doesn't matter whether or not your warriors use swords or clubs - the only stats we have are damage, hitpoints, speed and range.

For "Power and Strength" and "Speed and Litheness", you're basically researching combat techniques that let you make units that utilize HULK SMASH or dodge tactics viable. Nothing prevents you from telling your swordsmen to go HULK SMASH, but in the event that you do, well, they're still just swordsmen that care nothing for their own protection. "Melee Armor" is a bit too broad and you'd probably need something more specific. In addition, I'd rather it go the other way around (you need to research how projectiles behave and then you can optimize your projectiles and how to defend from them.)

Battlefield Utilization? Wtf is that? Melee hybridization is not something you need to research, just make the damn unit. Just beware, a ranged-melee hybrid will be just that. An archer in melee armor (or the other way around). You need more specialized research if you want to make bowswords. Same goes for unorthodox melee.

Ranged is the same deal.

For magic, I don't like giving utility to damage units, although it is possible with more specialized research, damnit. Mages don't interact with major spells, I thought I made the differences of mages and incantors known.

Riding looks like it's largely the same.

As for engineering, NO FREAKING FIREARMS, FOR ZAROS' SAKE! 4. Needs more specialization, 5. Everything you do with engineering requires mathematics, 6. 7. 8. 9. All need more specialization.

Do these 20 or so technologies have any benefit other than allowing applied technology? Because, it's possible that some people will just feel bored with science because if its dull system, no offence.

Toa Takanuva wrote:

Do these 20 or so technologies have any benefit other than allowing applied technology? Because, it's possible that some people will just feel bored with science because if its dull system, no offence.

EDiT: Forgive me, I appear to have misread what you wrote and assumed you said something that would've been smarter than what you did say. Firstly, I don't know which 20 or so technologies you're referring to, because we've tossed every system thus far except for the free-form one. Secondly, I feel like Technology shouldn't play quite as large a role as it did in GWV, but it still deserves attention. Thirdly, from what I can understand, the system you're criticizing is exactly the same as the one in GWIV.