One question do I have. Does the tech cost rise with bigger galaxy setups? The calculation I have is the following. If 40 colonies in a lets say medium galaxy put out 400 research points per turn, 160 colonies in a large galaxy put out 1600 points. But if the cost of the tech tree remains the same, the player will reach the tech cap very soon. And further tech research will be irrlevant.


Stardrive 2 (as bad as it is in some respects) do have a quite clever solution for this problem. It introduced a tech cost penalty of +x% per planet after the first the empire colonizes.

We don't yet have different map sizes (though that's coming soon), so we haven't yet run into those scaling issues. We also don't yet have the latter third of the tech tree in place, so in the beta you run out of technologies faster than you should.

I think it makes sense to do some scaling based on map size, but I'm not sure it's appropriate to penalize an empire for having more planets. A larger empire should be able to produce more science.

SD2's method is quite good but an optional percentile adjustment slider during game setup is fine too

Of course a bigger empire will always produce more research than a small one up to a certain extent, but not several times that much. For example if this would be true in our real world, little Switzerland would be a third world country, no?

No, IMO having a certain balance in this matter will serve 2 aspects. First aspect is to balance larger maps against smaller ones and second help the player to follow different strategies, not only building and conquering as many research labs as possible.

so which solution could be ok?

1 - SD2. BTW SD2 named a practical reason why there is an empire penalty: "because larger empires have a more inefficient buerocracy and research administration". While I often saw in 4x games no solution at all (which inevitably lead to a limited and often boring endgame) I never saw a more elegant one than that of SD2.

2 - Another solution would be to make the techlist so big that you never can research it to the end, even if you control hundreds of planets on very large maps. Of course this is difficult for you, because you have to program ALOT more techs than now. (maybe 10 times?)

3 - Or you could do it like in CIV. CIV´s solution is to stop the game before you run out of techs. I always found this a bad, boring and not very creative, so I hope not that you go this way.

4 - you could make the techs more expensive on bigger maps. This means although the technology buying experience is the same each game, it has a different pacing. Of course this would not solve the Switzerland problem (see above)

5 - or you could make "future-techs" which are just miniaturization and have no special function, like in late game of MOO2. (also not a very creative solution, IMO)

SIS has four tech eras -- essentially: early, middle, late, and overkill. You get most of your ship hulls by the end of middle, and the game should be mostly over by late. If you really focus tech or the game gets bogged down, or you deliberately drag your feet... you enter the overkill era -- superscience, in which the techs get ridiculously powerful. If the game isn't over by then, the superweapons available in the superscience era should end it one way or the other before long. (Those techs are not in the game currently, in case you were wondering.)

SIS will include a sort of "domination" victory in which the game can end when you reach a certain threshold percentage of population and/or star systems (because, past a certain point, the game is already won and is just a question of mopping up). There should rarely ever be a situation in a normal game in which you run out of techs but the game isn't over yet, unless you're deliberately turtling and dragging your feet, or you've turned off that victory condition; so, from a game design standpoint, if the player is trying to win and runs out of techs, something is wrong. People can play however they like, and so I wouldn't actively discourage turtling, but I also wouldn't want to reward it. Applying a tech penalty to large empires would essentially be an incentive to turtle, and I'm not sure that's a good incentive. This is a game of expansion, and if you choose not to expand, more power to you... but the game in that case should be fairly difficult.

There should perhaps be scaling monetary costs for increasing empire sizes, as large empires do cost money to manage. I'm just not sure that principle applies as directly to research.

I think scaling tech costs for different maps sizes may make sense. The concern then would be that the early game on a large map could be unnecessarily slow.

However, any such tech scaling can't completely eliminate the problem of finite technologies. It's not possible to provide enough techs so that they will never run out (unless you generate them dynamically, which has its own problems), and I don't think it's a good idea to even try. Having a game in which 90% of the techs couldn't be researched in a typical game would, I think, be terrible game design. Aside from the colossal waste of development time and resources, I think many players would feel that there was something wrong if the game always ended 10% of the way into the tech tree. The common method of having generic High Tech items at the end of the tree is a decent one, so at least there's something to research, and even better if they provide real benefits like miniaturization or happiness, or even just score points.

Switzerland and other small first-world countries are part of a larger community; the vast majority of the technology that they use was developed outside their own country by someone else, and many technologies developed internally are based on foreign technologies or are developed as part of foreign partnerships. The diplomatic system in SIS will allow you do buy and trade technologies and form alliances with other factions, and even hire mercenaries, and so you can play as a Switzerland if you like (I recommend the Phidi). But, in a game of expansion and warfare, it's going to be tough to win as Switzerland if a true superpower comes knocking.

Arioch wrote:Applying a tech penalty to large empires would essentially be an incentive to turtle, and I'm not sure that's a good incentive. This is a game of expansion, and if you choose not to expand, more power to you... but the game in that case should be fairly difficult.

Thats a danger, thats true, but you will not want to do it if you want to win. In practice you dont turtle in SD2, so their empire penalty rule is not really an incentive to turtle, because even if you dont progress that much in technology as in other games, your capital ship output is still bigger than that of smaller empires. The idea behind the empire penalty is that even smaller AI empires half your size will give you a fair fight because their ships have nearly the same tech than yours, and are no overwalk. Yes, you will win the combat, but only because you have more military output.


CIV circumvents this case by cheating heavily and giving its smaller nations insane technology boni. I find that approach unfairly scripted and uncreative and I would avoid it at all cost.

Arioch wrote:There should perhaps be scaling monetary costs for increasing empire sizes, as large empires do cost money to manage. I'm just not sure that principle applies as directly to research.

IMO, ideally a scaling should mostly apply to research and not to empire size. I am doing game design myself and when I designed my 4x game I seperated tech and military output totally by giving each player a fixed amount of research points regardless of empire size. In our groups this separation does wonder because it support smaller empires to hold their own against larger ones. It makes always for a different a VERY interesting and very tactical playing experience. But I know my approach is not mainstream. In mainstream 4x everbody wants to HAVE to have research labs or whatever. Nobody seems to care about that this approach always leads a one way strategy which is: expand as fast as you can.

Arioch wrote:I think scaling tech costs for different maps sizes may make sense. The concern then would be that the early game on a large map could be unnecessarily slow.

To circumvent this you could on larger maps make late techs more expensive while maintaing the standard tech cost of early techs.

Of course all this is only valid if you really intend to make larger galaxies than what you have now. But somewhere I read a whopping 300 systems which I personally would find great. Thats the sole reason why I opened this thread.

Many games penalize the bigger empire to lessen the snowball effect.I think bigger empires should get huge penalize effects for both realism and gameplay.

I also think tech trees should never run out before the game is over.If the player want's to max out a tech tier oneshould have to focus on that tier.No faction should have every tech.