Indeed.  We only know what they tell us, and they might be doing something innovative that renders our ideas non-applicable or redundant. 

So I'm thinking the best we can do is hash out the ideas, come to a consensus, and post a direct proposal to SD for them to give feedback upon whenever they feel like gracing us with their presence   It appears that those steps are done, and we should move on to other discussions while we wait on SD except to respond to and process additional community feedback.

@Keith

Doctrine should be based on player gaming behavior within a [50 - 100] turns sliding windows.

Each doctrine should have differents windows as training troops and making buildings doesn't take the same time number of turns of wise.

If you reach the cap to access a doctrine, the IU tooltip should ask you if you want to apply that doctrine or not, leaving you more liberty or giving you a wanted boost toward a direction.

Once you got a doctrine you will have to wait minimum of turns before re-evaluation. If in contrary you rejected a doctrine, you shoud not be asked again for a lot of turn because you turned it down and it won't come back anytime soon.

In other word you can chose to apply or not a doctrine but only by changing your gaming behavior you can end one.

If an emergancy doctrine breaker is needed, a player may pay with an increase of unrest within his civilization to end a doctrine. Azincourt trashed the superiority of mounted knights troops doctrine, see the political echo afterward.

I want a more elegant way to implement doctrine than the one used in Heart of Iron where you must pay every change of doctrine with instability because most change of doctrine are volontary.

The trouble is the range of national ideas. It must neither be limited in the number of picks, like in the Paradox interactive "Rome" nor by the number & categories of choices like in "Civilizations".

I want to play a civilization like a RPG hero gaining traits while playing. I want my civilization to espouse my way of playing not to have the feeling that i plugin a serie swithes to tune my civilization like a guitar.

No doubt which is why I want open-ended systems with everything optional and for the elements that can't be optional then easy modding access.

Yes we are moving on from the main idea. I started a thread on systems but it seems to have floated of the first page.

They'll reply in due time, I'm sure.

It's been a month and I'm starting to get twichy with all of the waiting for insight into the technology system of this game.

I feel as though I am already addicted to this game and it hasnt been released yet. Bad sign for me, good sign for SD.

Exactly, when all aspects of the game are not specifcly controled by the player it makes the general choices they can make much more meaningful as well as free up their mind to focus on the bigger picture. I think that the great ideas included in this thread, if applied, would acomplish exactly that.

If, under a specific research system, you find that replayability suffers because you keep picking the same tech path, that's your own damn fault for never mixing it up and you shouldn't bitch about how it's the game's fault for offering less replay value.

If your argument is "but but one specific path is clearly optimal", the following counterarguments apply:

1) In a game where there are a lot of viable ways to win or even ways to fight wars, how can there even BE an "always optimal path"? You should have to adjust your research picks based on what kind of map you are playing on and how exactly your opponents are playing. If you don't have to, then the game has design issues that go far beyond how tech research is determined and this whole debate's moot.

For instance, if it's due to there being a select few overpowered techs that are the best for any situation (lolsupplycrawlers), then guess what? Under blind research, those who roll those techs early crush those that don't. AWESOME. At least if you play SMAC with blind research off you can just choose to delay/skip those, or make an agreement in an MP game stating "no, this game isn't going to boil down to who gets SCs first. No using them.". With it on, someone's going to roll them first and dominate. (BTW I've never actually played SMAC MP so I don't know if SCs are really as overpowered as I'm making them out to be in MP, but they're a common source of BAWWWW from MP veterans so I'm running with it. And they do rape in SP, I can say that much)

If it's because of a lack of variety in options? Well, the replayability boat already sailed in that case. And then hit a glacier and burst into flames and sunk.

If you're assuming elemental will suffer from these kinds of problems, you have a pretty bleak outlook on how it'll turn out and should probably just skip it.

2) For any given situation, your "100% optimal tech path" is, 99% guaranteed, not. It might be the one you're most comfortable with at the time, but not the most powerful if played right. Experiment. Try different strategies in different games. You'll probably find something that works better for you.

3) If you care that damn much about choosing the most efficient tech path, why would you ever support an option that completely forbids you from playing in the most efficient way possible?

Realism for its own sake is never good design, it also needs to benefit the game in some way. The horn pro-blind-research people seem to be tooting the most is "it adds replayability", and I just don't see it at all.

This "you can choose to narrow your research but you take a penalty for it" idea sounds like the bad kind of compromise - one of those things that would half-assedly try to please all camps and end up leaving everyone only partially satisifed. This is worsened by the fact that a big part of the anti-specific-research camp, the part that thinks it hurts replayability, shouldn't even exist.

Stick with the traditional research model and let those people who complain about how it makes a game less replayable learn to discover the solution to that problem, because for any game that's well designed in other areas, it's there and it's damn obvious.

And for fuck's sake, people, stop insulting SMAC by referring to blind research as "SMAC-style". You make it sound like blind research was the only way to play that game. No, it was an optional ticker that defaulted to "off". And, one which was assumed to be off in most in-depth strategy discussions for the game.

I would agree with you if we lived in an ideal world where computer games were perfectly balanced But that sad truth is that in every single game I've ever played that uses research, no matter how well-designed or how much I enjoyed the game, I always end up finding a number of technologies that are good enough that most of the time, I spend most of my research getting to them. I'm not talking about a single crazy overpowered technology that essentially breaks the game. I'm talking about a number of technologies that stand out from the rest in most situations, just enough so that I almost always find myself going towards them.

Obviously I'd be jubilant of SD could avoid that problem all-together, but I'm not keeping my hopes up. From my experience, nobody has ever succeeded there. And the bigger the tech tree, the harder it is to avoid this problem. And if they want extremely large maps to be viable (which they have said they do) then they pretty much need very large tech trees. Having a system that penalizes you for choosing exactly what to research when solves that problem. 

Yes, if there are a select few completely overpowered techs that are the best for any situation, then a random situation would just make things worse. But I'm hopeful that SD can avoid that problem. But if we're talking about a larger number of generally superior technologies, then a system that encourages you to somewhat randomize your research can be a good thing imo. It means going for all of those technologies won't always be the best move. And it means that if somebody gets one or two of them they aren't going to immediately steamroll everybody else, because they only become really overpowered in aggregate.

Yeah, you could always say that I could just avoid researching those techs in order to mix things up. I don't know about you, but I find it hard to intentionally debilitate myself. On the other hand, if I'm forced to choose to either research those slightly superior techs at an increased cost, or to somewhat randomize my research for cheaper, then the the superiority of those techs is diminished, my games will play more differently, and I will have more fun. Maybe you won't, but I will

That would only be a problem if the tech tree is small. There are way more possible research routes in a tech tree with 100 techs than there ever will be players on a map. (To point out why: pretend there are just 5 techs, with no prereqs or anything. With just those 5, there are 120 possible orders in which to research them all. Now imagine 100 techs) Especially considering each faction will likely have somewhat different trees. So yes, maybe in 1 out of 1000 huge games or something someone will get lucky and hit the best techs quickly... 

It has nothing to do with being smart. I don't find it fun to mix up my tech paths when I know very well that there is a better option. And "a clown who doesn't know how to do anything but pick randomly" won't leave you in the dust even if he gets lucky with blind research, unless you're also a clown who doesn't know how to play.

Umm, no. There is a huge difference between requesting that the research mechanics don't force me to make inferior decisions in the game in order to play differently, and having to make said inferior decisions. A penalty to specific research doesn't debilitate myself, because it affects everybody. Ultimately it changes gameplay, and in my opinion for the better. Feel free to disagree with me, but don't debase yourself by turning this personal and saying it's BS that I dislike something.

Except that the Blind/Focused/Specific model that we've come up with in this thread doesn't force you to do anything. You can do purely specific research if you want, it'll just cost you more. Or you could do purely blind or focused research for better efficiency. But what it really encourages is to use all three methods. So it doesn't force me to mix things up. It just makes going down the same research route every game less efficient, and therefore actually gets rid of any optimal research paths.

Edit: another nice feature of a Blind/Focused/Specific feature is that it would even be easy to add sliders in the game setting to change around the efficiency of the different types of research. If you hate random research and only want specific research in the game, slide the specific feature to 100% and the rest to 0%. It would require extra AI work, though, and I can't profess to know how easy or hard that would be.

I liked the blind research in Alpha Centauri. I do think though, that it is particularly suited to that game because a lot of the game is about exploration and discovery, and because you are being told a story. Much of that story is revealed through the technology tree. So, it's great for flavour reasons. It could work well for flavour reasons in Elemental too.

However, I know that often with this sort of game many people aren't interested in the story, but are just trying to beat the game mechanics. Notably, any time you're playing multiplayer other than cooperative. Blind research shouldn't be mandatory, but I will use it in single player if it's implemented.

Me too.