Unlockable Tech based on Conditions

Very nice. I've been agitiating for a system like this in GC3 for nearly a year.

This was sort of done in Civilization 4 and its expansions, but with the civ Wonders (like Heroic Epic where you had to have a level 4 unit, or the Pentagon with a level 6 unit.)

I like the general idea a lot, but I woould like it even more if the requirements were somewhat randomized from game to game. Otherwise it just become another checklist every game to do to gain the tech you want.

Hmmm... at first it sounds nice, but after a deeper thought I believe that it wouldn't be so great - at least implemented ad hoc. Such system introduces yet another randomness into the game - i.e., winner win be determined once more by a dice roll. Why is that, you ask? Let's assume we have two leaders: Aaa & Bbb. Aaa was spawned not far away from a nest of spiders, while Bbb landed somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Aaa was killing those pesky spiders, while Bbb tried to expand his territory. Due to the fact that Aaa fought in X battles he will have an edge over Bbb when they meet. As you can see, with a little work Aaa attained a valuable tech, while Bbb didn't even have a chance to get it. Bbb could of course send some scouts, so that they would lose X fights against a dragon (for example); this, however, introduces a game mechanic that would require a player to make senseless decisions, just to meet a particular condition.

Unfortunately my counter-proposal isn't very close to what you've proposed, but I am thinking about such system in which you would be able to receive some special techs, but only after completing a quest. Imagine such situation: you are playing with two of your friends. 100 rounds have already passed and it's unclear who is the most powerful. Suddenly, an old powerful witch sends a message to all of you that she will reward anyone who kills a "Dragon of the Fallen Temple". Apart from the message, all players receive map coordinates of the dragon's lair. Obviously, a player who is closer to the dragon is more lucky (so there is some randomness), but even if he is close, he still has to muster huge army, which would make him vulnerable against his opponents. Of course, as all players got the message, all the rest can join the fray and don't have to meet some artificial conditions.

My 0.02€ .

I can't see how you'd find this too RNG dependant. Player Aaa might have those spiders close by, but player Bbb can expand more easily and get too unlock the 'Expansionist' research much sooner, or might have a Mine close by which player Aaa hasn't. If you want to make everything the same for each player, where is the fun in that?

I agree with this approach.  It really depends on how powerful the unlockable tech is.  As long as it isn't that much more powerful than other techs this could be a lot of fun.  It's all a matter of game balance.

Well, the tech I gave as an example was just that: an example. But yeah, sure, someone could start three wars in the beginning of a game just to unlock a tech... but... then they'd be fighting three wars...

The conditions and the tech benefits will of course have to be carefully balanced. I do like the idea of slightly randomized conditions, as Denryu suggested.

I like it, but only warfare should be "battle" unlockables like the example.

I'd also love to see diplomacy unlockables based on interactions with AIs (i.e. unlockable trade posts if you have trade with 3 or more civs), Exploration based unlockables for the Civ tree., maybe quest based unlockables for Magic.

I agree, all leaders shouldn't have the same set of bonuses. Maybe it looked like I am strongly against this idea, but I am not. You have to understand that between an AWESOME idea, and a SUPER COOL feature, is a thingie called "implementation". Even though I am excited about this idea, I see a couple of issues, and it's important we discuss them.

I am a power gamer, at least I always considered myself as such (in other words: either I clear the game 100%, or I don't play it longer than 10h.), and I always think about an idea in terms of how something which can be exploited. The perfect case is when you implement a feature that is closely connected with reality (it reflects it well, therefore players will easily grasp the idea), and  (also) it's balanced. At first you admire features that are closely linked with real life (or just cool), but in the end you will always care about system mechanics and ways to 'break the game' - i.e., bend the game mechanic, so that you are closer to a victory.

If you don't understand what I mean, here are a couple more explanations and proposals.

• Unlockable techs HAVE to be equal in power (aka balanced), so that no player will skip them. Maybe it's easy to say, but when you have a tech tree available for every player, all of them can skip some poor techs, and develop the better ones. Here, we don't have such luxury - if an 'expansionist' tech is poor, then our sovereign has a problem (i.e. Bbb) .
• Conditions (which have to be met, in order to unlock a given tech) have to be well chosen. Each of these conditions have to have a well thought background and it should be strongly based on the game mechanics. In other words: if we implement a condition which states "Defeat 3 enemies" it means that we made a mistake. Defeating 3 bandits or 3 hordes of bloodthirsty demons is something different and such feats shouldn't be 'unified'. I also vote for no numbers in the conditions, as numbers are the easiest ones to get exploited.
  
• Due to those 2 statements above, I would propose that there would be no more than 3 unlockable techs for each tree. Every one of these techs should indicate that you really did something extraordinary which mattered in the game and wasn't an act to break the game.
• A couple of my proposals:
  • Victor [warfare]: You defeated an enemy sovereign.
  • Dragon Lord [warfare]: You 'tamed' a dragon.
  • Metropolis [civilization]: One of your cities reached maximum level of advancement (I don't have to say that such level shouldn't be easily obtainable).
  • Master of X [magic]: You learned all the spells from X domain. (X = Fire/Water/Earth/Wind)

Ok, now I understand better what you ment and I concur more with what you're asking for. Thanks for the extra explanation.

The unlockable techs should indeed be comparable / equal in power and usefullness. Also, the unlockable techs should be worth it, no fun in unlocking a tech if you can get a comparable upgrade / bonus by just following the normal tech tree.

Those are all good ideas. My example was just to illustrate the idea.

I think the advantage of such a system is that it would promote some unusual strategies. For example, instead of building a hundred cities you could just concentrate on developing one Metropolis so you can unlock the "Metropolis" tech and get whatever.

Of course, with the new "breakthrough" system there are essentially only 5 techs available. I'm fine with that. Maybe you could have unlockable breakthroughs?

I think that we are looking at this in the wrong prespective, instead of having unloackable techs in the pregenerated tech tree we should link this kind of things to the all questing and adventuring system.

In this way we a. randomize this techs so when you start a new game you don't have a recipe to unlock them and b. add let the player get techs outside of the reaserch mechanism. If you don't like just handing the techs after compleating the quests than just unlock it in the reaserch tree.

As for general unloackable techs, I think that things like animal husbandry or metal weapons should only be available after you found wild horses or researched mines repectevly.

Warder

Interesting idea.  Some of my favorite diplo wrangling in ToA is to get those unique racial techs.  So any kind of teching that goes above and beyond budgeting research makes for a little bit more interesting gaming.  But a thing to consider is that all the bonuses of these hard-to-get techs can easily be represented by any number of mechanisms.  E.g. why not just give the bonus to the unit that kills 10 other units, instead of making that the criteria for researching a unique tech?