SlowScience ruleset ideas and plans

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3plus4i
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SlowScience ruleset ideas and plans

Post by 3plus4i »

Hooray, after over 6 weeks I can finally write here! I have been working on my ideas all this time, but could never activate my account. I got basically no feedback on reddit, nor answers, which took a big toll on my motivation. I'm mostly relying on what I wrote there for now and hope I can get it going again.

I always preferred to play with a focus more on the simulation part than the strategy part. Back in the days I simply increased research cost for that, but with Freeciv I have much more options, so I decided to also add new techs, buildings and maybe change some other rules. I gave it the working title SlowTech and might publish it at some point, or at least open my ideas for discussion and consideration, since it's questionable that I ever get to the point of finishing it.

My original idea was to mostly fill holes, where tech developments seemed to take too big of a leap, fill in some that I missed and refine the tree to give more to research. The most ridiculous cases are the final goal of the game itself, the spaceship, Fusion and Environmentalism, that utterly underestimate the complexity and challenge of those technologies. The middle ages also seem to go by way too quickly, also accelerated by the op republic, though I don't have that many ideas for that period. I'd welcome suggestions.

For now it turned out though that the most developed ideas are different ones so far, I also expanded to buildings and mechanics related changes. It's not easy to wrap my head around what's possible, since the descriptions on the wiki are very limited. I'd also like to know what other rulesets did, so I don't reinvent the wheel when it's already been done. Different effects for wonders would be interesting, since I'm considering that as well.

My main goal is to get a ruleset that allows for a slower, more research and building up focused game, though playing strategical against competitors should still be entirely possible, I don't intend any significant limitations there. It's just not the focus of my work.

I will add posts to elaborate on specific ideas and plans. I got quite a lot done over those weeks, so the challenging part is to reconstruct my reasoning about what I settled on and what aspects I threw away in the process. Well, plus taking the time to put it all into words.
3plus4i
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Re: SlowScience ruleset ideas and plans

Post by 3plus4i »

The tech tree is actually pretty much settled at this point. I'm not fully satisfied with it, especially the post-modern part was really hard to design. Research was much more difficult than I would have imagined, so I had to wing it a lot, to not waste too much time and energy or get tied up.

Image

I created this image with Graphviz, this is the source file for it:
freecivSlowTechTechtree.dot.7z
(2.25 KiB) Downloaded 369 times
The techs marked in green are the ones I added.
cazfi
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Re: SlowScience ruleset ideas and plans

Post by cazfi »

Seeing that your tech tree has quite a number of new techs, my first reaction is that we will take a lot of things from this to the "granularity" ruleset.

"Granularity" is a ruleset part of of freeciv source repository as of freeciv-3.1, but it won't be made part of the freeciv-3.1 release. At this point it's more of a ruleset to use in testing the freeciv engine. The name "granularity" refers to the goal of the ruleset having all kinds of values in more granular level, e.g., to avoid the traditional civ1/civ2 style integer math issues (50% of 1 is 0). Towards that goal also the tech tree should be much bigger than traditional ones - like getting 10% bonus from five separate techs where traditional ones have had just one tech giving 50% bonus.
3plus4i
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Re: SlowScience ruleset ideas and plans

Post by 3plus4i »

Let's start with a smaller tech, that turned into pretty intriguing idea, that might make it interesting for other rulesets and maybe even standard. The first possible technology that cam to my mind when thinking about the middle ages was Crop Rotation. It was a significant factor in growing population, though it turned out in evolved in several steps, from the two-field system thousands of years ago to modern crop rotation. Putting it in the antiquity seems justified.

Deciding on the effect was more tricky. Putting another penalty without it would limit early growth too much or even make it impossible and generally increasing food production would probably be too much. Limiting effect on cells above a certain production would make it too weak on the other hand. Then I had the idea to combine it with my intention to nerf the republic a bit and make the food reduction independent of government and tie it to this tech instead. It probably doesn't effect the power of the republic much, but it should still give an incentive to research it to increase growth. I came up with another nerf for republic in the meantime, by reducing it's effect to a general 20% increase in trade for each whole city.

I decided to put Monarchy and Herbalism as requirements, another new tech I plan to add, which requires Ceremonial Burial and Pottery. It enables no other tech so far. I would have liked to link it to farming later, but I think it's fine as it is now.
3plus4i
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Re: SlowScience ruleset ideas and plans

Post by 3plus4i »

cazfi wrote: Fri Sep 30, 2022 9:48 pm Seeing that your tech tree has quite a number of new techs, my first reaction is that we will take a lot of things from this to the "granularity" ruleset.
Oh, that's a ruleset I wasn't aware of yet. Is there a description besides the source files? I will take a look at it. Testing is what my ruleset really doesn't have yet, except for the technical side.
cazfi
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Re: SlowScience ruleset ideas and plans

Post by cazfi »

3plus4i wrote: Fri Sep 30, 2022 9:52 pm
cazfi wrote: Fri Sep 30, 2022 9:48 pm Seeing that your tech tree has quite a number of new techs, my first reaction is that we will take a lot of things from this to the "granularity" ruleset.
Oh, that's a ruleset I wasn't aware of yet. Is there a description besides the source files?
No other documentation. It also doesn't have much content, with no new content in a long while (I guess it would typically grow along new engine features it want to use). One notable thing is that it uses "placed" infrastructure extras, not ones built by units.
3plus4i
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Re: SlowScience ruleset ideas and plans

Post by 3plus4i »

Turns out a big portion of my ideas actually fall into the age of enlightenment and industrial revolution, though the former still counts to the medieval period in regards to Freeciv (and Civ 2), at least up until this point. Another idea for an earlier tech has developed into a whole tree by now: Printing. It's a tech I quite missed so far, considering how transformative it was, though that point seems to be debated in recent times. I want it to give an automatic boost to schools, which I added as building to Literacy, and Libraries, which get a reduced base effect of 50%. Schools is another thing I always wondered why it didn't exist in Civ 2, they increase science by 50% base as well. Gutenberg was a wonder I considered.

The next step, together with Theology, is Age of Enlightenment. Nothing special it unlocks so far, although I would have wanted to move the effect reduction of Cathedrals from Communism to here, but that'd be way too soon after their introduction, Michelangelo's Chapel might not even have been built yet. Age of Enlightenment is supposed to be another key tech in the tree, which basically opens the next level of technologies. I have rerouted Steam Engine here, replacing Invention (it's already indirectly is required through Printing),and Atomic Theory, replacing Theory of Gravity. I'll later take a look at the tree again, to see if more techs should be rebased from here.

A new tech base on Age of Enlightenment and Mathematics is Calculus, kind of a stand-in for advances in mathematics, that leads to General Relativity (with Theory of Gravity) and Thermodynamics (with Steam Engine).

The General Relativity branch will lead to Astrophysics (with Electronics) and later into the branch for Interplanetary Space Flight.

Thermodynamics is followed by Quantum Mechanics (with Atomic Theory) and then to Semiconductor (with Electronics) which enables Miniaturization instead of Electronics. Quantum Mechanics enables more techs, but this is already getting too much.

I was worried for some time that I'm just inflating the tech tree here without adding anything relevant, but I linked several new buildings to these techs now, mostly to boost science. I want tech cost to increase much stronger, but that means I also need more improvements to boost science output, to compensate.
3plus4i
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Re: SlowScience ruleset ideas and plans

Post by 3plus4i »

Let's talk about the medical branch next. It baffled me that the only representatives of this big field were Medicine, kinda Sanitation and then jumping right to Genetic Engineering, like you just need big (greedy) corporations and a bit of medical knowledge and boom, we can cure cancer now, no biggy. Also not a single medical building. Since plagues exist now at least in some rulesets, I have to assume that they have changed that, I'd be very interested what they introduced and what the effects are. But now for my ideas, I already casually mentioned two of them.

It all starts with Herbalism, herbs and some other things have been used for treatments since tens of thousands of years ago. I based it on Ceremonial Burial and Pottery, the reasoning behind that being that Ceremonial Burial is the closest to rituals we have in the tree and Pottery is kinda useful for storage and processing. It could unlock a building representing early medical treatment, which would only be relevant for reducing Plague chance, I don't see much else it could do. I have no idea what that could be though.

Herbalism replaces Trade as requirement for Medicine which never made sense to me in the first place. Here we split into two different branches.

It first leads to Germ Theory, with no other requirements (so far), which is actually a bit early in the timeline. It was only first developed in the 16th century and didn't get accepted until the later half of the 19th century. It replaces Medicine as requirement for Sanitation and together with Atomic Theory leads to Molecular Biology. From there we go a pretty far way to Genetics, together with Computers. With Artificial Intelligence we finally get to Genetic Engineering, which in return is required for Astrobiology.

The other branch leads to Surgery, from Medicine and University. Surgery and Urban Development then enables Antiseptics, which allow building Hospitals. Hospitals are the required building for a city to grow beyond 24. Antiseptics with Labor Union enable Public Healthcare, which I want to automatically let hospitals make one citizen content, but increase the upkeep of hospitals by one gold. I don't know if this effect is possible to implement with the current effects, but it should be with the upcoming 3.2 version.
3plus4i
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Re: SlowScience ruleset ideas and plans

Post by 3plus4i »

After browsing through images on the wiki I found out, that mods with new graphics exist, that I never cam across so far. That made me think that I should start talking about buildings, because images for those are a critical part and a huge bottleneck so far.

But first I want to address a concept I early on decided I wanted in the game: variable city area. Modern cities can support much larger populations, not least because they aren't dependent on the supply of the surrounding area. I was pondering for a while about what technology could be the key and finally decided to introduce Urban Development. It can be researched with Industrialization and Refrigeration and enables the building Municipal Administration (Is the naming too fancy?). It increases the city radius by one and is quite expensive with an upkeep of 5. The best image I could find for this improvement is https://opengameart.org/content/pbr-textured-building.
Image

Increasing city radius affects balancing quite significantly. You can work the same area with half the cities, making most city improvements much more efficient. This has to be compensated by needing to spend more money elsewhere or reducing trade income, with both factors being affected by other changes as well. This is one of the biggest remaining challenges. The exception is happiness, which doesn't scale with city size, but we now need to make almost twice as many citizens happy or content, so more buildings are required. I was originally worried that I wouldn't come up with enough ideas, since I also wanted to make Temple and Colosseum become obsolete, but it turns out I rather have too much than too little. I think I have those improvements down, mostly, including wonders.

The idea of another improvement required to grow beyond a certain size immediately suggested itself with this change. I increased the threshold for the Sewer System to 16, to get regular intervals. Growing beyond size 24 now requires a Hospital, which becomes available with Antiseptics. I went with the image from here for now, resizing doesn't make it looks quite as cartoony https://opengameart.org/content/pixel-c ... -buildings
Image
As mentioned in a previous post, Hospitals also make a citizen content with the tech Public Healthcare, while also increasing their upkeep by one. Speaking of which, when will v 3.2 actually be released?

Urban Development and Automobile enable Transportation planning, where I want to move Mass Transit to. Pollution from traffic shouldn't be solvable immediately, it first has to become a problem. I have more changes planedin this area, but that's a topic for another time.
cazfi
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Re: SlowScience ruleset ideas and plans

Post by cazfi »

3plus4i wrote: Tue Oct 04, 2022 4:47 pmwhen will v 3.2 actually be released?
Let's say that if you want your ruleset to be usable on a stable freeciv release on any reasonable time, you have to make it to work on 3.1, i.e., to work around any shortcomings of 3.1 compared to 3.2, until 3.2 comes out.

We currently have a goal to get a feature release out every two years. We've not managed in such a feat in well over ten years, so it might be a bit optimistic, but still trying....
3.0 was released early this year, 3.1 should come out early 2024 (going to beta before next spring, I hope), and then 3.2 would come out in 2026 (going to beta in 2025)
3.1 has already its datafile format frozen, so you can develop rulesets for it. 3.1 does not have its network protocol frozen yet - you can't expect current server/client to communicate with a server/client of the final 3.1.0.
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