Thrive Game Development -

Okay guys, here is my first Devblog to fulfill my responsibility as Strategy Team lead.

Finally I have procured some work to show for my efforts in conceptualizing the Strategy Mode. The Research Web is a pivotal component of post-sapience gameplay, as it is what drives your species forwards from the Awakening stage to their final steps into Ascension. Through a graphing program, I have managed to lay out the relationships of all the researches until the early Space Stage. The reason I haven't put a screenshot of it here is because it is too big and has too much detail, and would take about 50 screenshots to display, so its easier just for you to download it to see it.

Updated Research Web

There are some researches lacking on the upper branch of the web. There are also some Researches that are disconnected from the web. These are areas that are still undergoing development, and any suggestions are welcome on this thread. Be sure to have yEd installed if you wish to view the Research web. A quick Google search should find it for you.

Here's a quick rundown of what this Research Web holds.

Researches - These are akin to "Technologies" from other games. They can be discovered as a result of reaching the required threshold of Research Points. Research Points are in turn generated through unit and player actions, buildings, agreements with other nations, etc.

Inventions - These are best thought of as "sub-researches". Whenever a Research is discovered, all the Inventions connected to it (Inventions are represented in the web by the smaller boxes below the bigger boxes) are unlocked and become available for discovery. Officially, Inventions are not required to discover further Researches. However, there are Inventions that do provide or enable actions or conditions that in turn are what discover later Researches. An example of this is with Fire, which is an Invention, being necessary for some later Researches.

Research Points can at first only be generated through actions. This is during the tribal stages of your nation. As your nation develops, and you discover Record Keeping, can can invest extra Research Points into fields of research, which are colour coded on the web, and the points will randomly proliferate to all unlocked Researches in that field. Scientific Method, when discovered, will allow you to invest your points in one specific Research. Investing points into a specific Research after it has been discovered will put the points towards discovering that Research's Inventions.

The different fields of Research are:

Spoiler:

Hopefully this web will help you better understand what Researches and Inventions are going to be in the game in the first place, and furthermore how they are related to one another.