gaining technology by accident or on purpose

from when humans were in caves and first discovered fire humanity is always on the quest to discovery new technologies to help us do things easier. technology is extremely important for your species to progress and get better. there should be a board (or chart) that you can go to (in tribal or civilization stage) that shows you what other species or your enemies what level of tech they have ( your own species can have hard feelings towards the other extremely easily we all know). this chart shows some of the advancements the "other" had made (other being the enemy).it shows how far the "other" is to having big milestones. one early on would be the discovery of fire it would eventually go to gunpowder (im just using these earthly technologies as examples there could be others but bare with me) one huge milestone should be nuclear arms since that can turn the tied in war ( as seen when the us nuked japan)
ok thats what i have so far give me some feed back later

1. st Humanity didnt discover fire, our preprosscesors did. (First invention of Homo-Sapiens is the lighter and throwable spear)

2. nd Nukes didnt change the tide of the Pacific war, The battle of midway did. The americans just claimed less people died this way.

3. I dont know eactly what you mean but the tech system already is almost finisched already from what i have read.

4. And you dont seem to know alot of how humanity discovered knowlage.

But your comment brings me to an idea the game dosnent cover already (maybe it does but i havent discovered it in the wiki yet) (espionage to get information about what is going on in other tribes, nations ... and not only that what you can see from outside)

Maybe the others understand what you mean and i got you totally wrong..

ok what ever you dont have to be a Belgium about it. some form of humanity discovered fire (homo sapiens). nukes didn't change the tide in the pacific war but had a lot of affects later on (cold war ring any bells)
and number 4 is just insulting how i read it, you do not know me long enough to make a judgment of me you should be nice to people not completely undermine them them be a little nicer okay. but anyway yes being able to see what level of tech your rivals have would be a plus and would help you a lot

I didnt mean to insult you in any way, i was only listing facts, and not homo spaiens but this creature "discovered fire": Cro-Magnon-Mensch

And nr 4 is just my impression of you. And a part of that impression comes from the fact that you dont seem to know inventions were being made even before Homo Sapiens exsisted. And you dont seem to know you opened a thread for something that has already been discussed.

Im not very polite but thats me, im also new here but i at least try to read everything on this site and the wiki before posting new topics. You are also welcome here but pls dont get over excited and open topics before even looking at what the others have already discussed.

And i never get what the ppl mean with a "belgium". I normally dont believe in stereotypes and i have no idea how this one got created.

BastianKraft wrote:

I didnt mean to insult you in any way, i was only listing facts, and not homo spaiens but this creature "discovered fire": Cro-Magnon-Mensch

And nr 4 is just my impression of you. And a part of that impression comes from the fact that you dont seem to know inventions were being made even before Homo Sapiens exsisted. And you dont seem to know you opened a thread for something that has already been discussed.

Im not very polite but thats me, im also new here but i at least try to read everything on this site and the wiki before posting new topics. You are also welcome here but pls dont get over excited and open topics before even looking at what the others have already discussed.

And i never get what the ppl mean with a "belgium". I normally dont believe in stereotypes and i have no idea how this one got created.

Let's all calm down for a moment. Belgium is the way we censor things here, it's a reference to a great work of literature, and not related at all to Germany's gateway to France. Back onto the topic, regardless of factual misunderstandings, which were put up just as quick examples, obviously, the idea was to be able to see the technology of other nations. Now, since you're both new here, I'll show you my thought process on this, so that you might know of a good way to go about this in the future.

Ask these questions of the OP
Does this system already exist? no
Does this system address a problem in the real world that might come up ingame? yes
Does this system mimic the real world? yes and no
Here's our first interesting answer. Yes, in the real world, nations know what other nations are up to. However, this system is a bit of a scapegoat, since you never know everything they're doing. Going back to the cold war example, the United States estimated that the USSR had many more nuclear missiles than they did, because every time a US spyplane flew overhead of the missiles, the Soviets would pick them up and move them somewhere else. By moving their missiles around, they easily countered the US's espionage. That's really what this system comes down to- spying. Of course, there is also just word of mouth. Peter the Great of Russia left for the west to learn about their technology because he had heard it was way ahead of Russia's- and it was. Basically, he knew what they had, but not how it worked. That's how this system should work. It should show the progress of researches of other nations.

Knowledge is always a resource in games, and this applies tenfold for our Strategy mode. As long as you have imigrants from some place or merchants travelling somewhere, you will always have minimal knowledge of that place. To get more, you have either to get the knowledge through diplomacy or send some specialists to learn. If the place you want to get the knowledge from is hostile, the only option is spying.

You will always have to spend some resources, be it time, people, or actual materials, to gain knowledge. The more resources you spend, the more knowledge you get and the more accurate it is, but the more suspicious you will be, or in the case of spying, the bigger chance one of your spies will be catched.

Edit: As Scio mentioned, you could also do it Peter the Great's way. Control one organism with the Org. mode and look personally how it's all done.

Well, i dont think a prgress bar would be the bast plan, maybe your country just knows home much more or less advanced a country is compear to your own, like nation a has 4-10 technologys more then we do. the better your espionage production is the more exactly you know what they have. The same with troops. The enemy has 15-20 divisions and 150-300 Aircraft. (the way the espionage in civ works is a very good example in this case)

But some things we know about them without having espionage at all, for example nation a is seen using an aircraft. Then you would know a tech exsists without knowing how it works. At the same time it is easier for you own country to also gain the tech. Copying, stealing, natural spread of ideas and so on. This would also help prevent wierd tech discovry patterns like having all technologys to build modern battle tanks while not even being able to heal simple wounds.

And of course if a other nation offers to trade thier tech it would also be shown as it being a know tech that cannot be used yet.

This leads to another gameplay element that needs special rules, In the tech tree you will only see techs you already have and the ones you know exsist. The rest will be hidden. This prevents forcing the development of something specific (In Civ i always thought its kind of wierd telling the people in my nation to invent a Needle that points to north and then name it compass xD )

As always this is only another concept, and i would be more than pleased if someone could do it better.

You got ninja'd, Bastian But we posted basically the same thing.

Yeah, but i always like to have some examples in these comments because you then have to think more about it (everybody has a different case in mind). That normally leads to seeing problems faster and adds a few filters to the concept.

Right now im just waiting for somebody to finish up the concept and it to be whitelistet and transfered into the wiki.

The mechanics are like this:

As long as traders or imigrants are coming from a place, you will always have minimal information of that place (traders/imigrants will always come unless the place is a hostile nation or it's unreachable). Gaining more knowledge of the area is dependant on the situation:

1. Friendly nation, open borders - there are two main ways of gaining knowledge from friendly nations, diplomacy and sending specialists to the nation.

Diplomacy would be gaining the knowledge by contracts and treaties; most likely it would involve the friendly nation sending it's specialists to you to teach your own specialists.

The second option is sending your specialists to learn in the target nation. While this will be somewhat slower than the diplomatic solution due to cultural and logistical problems, it will almost always work and there's no need for diplomatic debate.

2. Hostile nation, closed borders - there's only one way to gain knowledge from hostile nations: espionage. While it carries severe risks, there isn't any other way to gain knowledge of hostile nations. Getting your spies catched will worsen your diplomatic relations with the country at best and reveal some knowledge of your own country to the enemy at worst.

Note that this is appliable to every sort of information, from general information about a nation, it's military, economy, to info about single TOs.

Also note that you can select how much resources are spent on the process of gaining information. The more you spend, the faster and more reliable will information be, but the bigger chance of something going wrong is there.

Oh, i don't think we've mentioned that whole fields thing. You can set research to a certain field, like directing what gets funding. From memory the fields are Health, Military, Travel, Science... oh, i forget. See the research and inventions list in the wiki.

Also, you can set research to a certain research. This would increase the chance of an invention that falls under that research to be discovered, as well as increasing the chance for a new research to be discovered.