I was playing fall from heaven today and was thinking about the research system. I like the way we will now make discoveries in a category and get a choice of techs, but it still feels a little too similar to Civ. When I think about tech discoveries in the "real" world, most are associated to a great thinker. In addition, the quantity of discoveries is associated to the technological environment/culture. So here is my idea:
Each empire will have a base research depending on their improvements and culture (universities, funding, etc…) This research potential can be applied to any of the categories like the current system. I wouldn't make this more than 50% of the total available research to make the researchers more valuable.
The great minds in the game would be research resources just like they were in history. They would apply their research to the disciplines that they are good at. For example a researcher could have an extremely high war rating. You would have to pay him a wage for his services, but he could dramatically increase the chance of getting a war advance. These great minds could be found periodically in kingdoms depending on the amount of research and schooling that is occurring. They should cost enough that a player would not be able to afford them all and rare enough that if you lose a good researcher you would miss him.
These great thinkers could be traded (lending out their research for a period of time), kidnapped, bribed into joining a rival, etc.. This would do a few things. It would make these great thinkers valuable and need protection. It would provide an area of cold war conflict that would increase the importance of espionage. I think there could be some cool events put around it like: Super Mage was caught packing his bags for an unexpected trip, what do you do?
- torture him to know where he is going (find out who was trying to get him but lose his research for 10 turns)
- increase his pay and upgrade his accommodations (cost 100 gold, maintenance goes up 4 gold) and his loyalty goes up and his research continues uninterrupted.
- Let him go, good riddance
Having these great thinkers would give players more options to increase certain lines of research. The researchers would be people so they could be killed or die of old age… or explosions in the workshop. YIKES. There seems like a lot of potential to add a lot of flavor and strategy to the research system and to build some attachment to the great minds in your kingdom.
What do you think?
