Theory-technologies

I was just thinking a little bit about possible things in the industrial techtree and came up with a whole lot of requirements of all kinds of technology. Restrictions in the practical research (like tank-guns 5 years ahead of time) did not exist, apart from the respective practical tech - you could research your tank-guns ahead of time only suffering a little bit of headache caused by the ahead-of-time-modifier (which is far too low in my opinion).

Now, I thought about the requirements that prevented e.g. Germany to build a tank with gyrostabilized guns in 1940 - and it is clearly the lack of proper hydraulics, mechanic knowledge and material research.
They simply didn´t have researched all the things needed for the application in military (or even if, lacked the ability to implement it into an industrial production process and thus it is rather useless, a piece of paper on the drawing-board).

I wrote things like "electronic engineering" "explosives" "metallurgy", "mechanical engineering" - and I realized that it had quite some similarities with the techs you can research in the "theory" branch, which right now only provide you some bonus for theoretical values.

My subsequent idea was: Why not making these theory-techs requirements for the research of more advanced technologies? They could represent exactly this without the need to add further techs to the industrial screen and decrease redundant stuff. Right now, I do not research these theory-techs at all, making them required would hugely increase their usefulness, and double the penalty for researching too far ahead.

What do you think about this?

Black Guardian wrote:My subsequent idea was: Why not making these theory-techs requirements for the research of more advanced technologies? They could represent exactly this without the need to add further techs to the industrial screen and decrease redundant stuff. Right now, I do not research these theory-techs at all, making them required would hugely increase their usefulness, and double the penalty for researching too far ahead.

What do you think about this?

Good solution - a group of previously more or less useless techs would gain new relevance while the same solution could also prevent ahistorical tech-rushing.

Since the speed of our tech tree modding has seemingly accelerated to new level (kudos to Thaegen), it is time to seriously consider the revised theory system for the mod.

As I stated earlier, I liked the way to link theories into more concrete research projects. How about using disciplines of engineering as a partial basis of our theories?
So that instead of general theories, these techs would represent things like civil engineering, electrical engineering, aerospace engineering, marine engineering, manufacturing engineering and the like. The level of detail could be easily adjusted by either sticking with large key fields or by including some (but definitively not all) of the most important subdiscplines of some larger key field:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerospace_engineering#Elements

For me this seems to form a natural and logical basis for the theory part of our tech tree. The same approach could easily be applied to other parts of the theory tech tree as well, so that our military theories could be based on subdiscplines of military science and so on. What do you think?

Well, isn´t this basically the same idea with more flavour due to more plastic theory-techs? I don´t have any objections against this, as it is still what I proposed as the core-idea, just a bit more fleshed out

Feel free to go ahead here as well, I´m unfortunately preoccupied for the next few days and won´t be able to support you much except for writing a post now and then - Feel free to take the lead on the project for the next week, until now I had no objections against your ideas!

Black Guardian wrote:Well, isn´t this basically the same idea with more flavour due to more plastic theory-techs?

Yep, I just continued from where you started.
I got a temporary job for the week so I´m rather busy until next Friday as well, but expect a new layout for theory techs soon.

Karelian wrote:

Black Guardian wrote:Well, isn´t this basically the same idea with more flavour due to more plastic theory-techs?

Yep, I just continued from where you started.
I got a temporary job for the week so I´m rather busy until next Friday as well, but expect a new layout for theory techs soon.

No problem, as I said, I probably don´t have much time until the end of march or beginning of April as well, at least not for serious work.

We just have to make up our mind about the level of detail we want to build in here.

Since theories are going to form the foundation of our tech tree, I´ve been recently reading quite a bit about history of engineering.

Here are the current results. By the end of WWI engineering was divided into five major disciplines: civil, mechanical, industrial, chemical and electrical engineering.
The interwar era and especially WWII were, however, a period when scientific research went forward with astonishing speed, and by the 1950s the engineering discplines were divided as follows:

*civil
*transportation
*agricultural
*environmental
*production / manufacturing
*industrial
*metallurgical and mining
*mechanical
*automotive
*aeronautical
*marine
*chemical
*petroleum
*nuclear
*electrical
*electronic

While I think that keeping the theory techs limited to "major five" branches of engineering would bee too narrow approach, the latter list is certainly very close to the maximum number of engineering subcategories I´m planning to include. Yet we still have plenty of room in theory tech page even if we include all of them. I´m planning the rest of the theory techs and currently the idea of turning theories to represent other academic disciplines as well feels like a natural course to follow. What do you think?

All right then, my first scheme for revised theory tech tree is ready. While devising it I kept reminding myself that we are modding Hearts of Iron III, not Civilization IV, and that we should keep things simple enough. On the other hand the Cold War era was time when science truly "marched on" and achieved triumph after another as rivalling superpowers poured money on R&D.
Thus I´ve kept the major focus in the revised theory techs on Engineering disciplines that are applied sciences creating and researching things directly linked to warfare and Cold War arms race. The existence of the other techs in this plan is a result from the notion that new achievent system seems extremely promising. I´d like to test an idea that could allow us to give the player reason to invest even further on theory tech research:

If we can link achievement goals to certain tech levels, major and political Cold War efforts like the Space Race, Apollo Program, Green Revolution and the general arms race can be turned into strategic goals for the player to pursue. "Be the first superpower to launch a satellite/conduct manned space flight/create pernament orbital research station ech..." Furthermore, if we can link them to Victory Conditions we can truly speak of changing the basic nature of the game towards Cold War-era feeling of indirect competition. Now these are still pretty damn big "Ifs", but to be honest I´m quite thrilled by the prospects this approach gives us in terms of creating content to the mod and creating a gaming experience that differs from the standard HoI3.

Engineering:
*Metallurgical
*Chemical and petroleum
*Industrial
*Aeronautical
*Marine
*Electrical and electronic
*Nuclear
*Rocketry and astronautical

Natural sciences and mathematics:
Astronomy
Biology
Chemistry
Physics
Geosciences
Mathematics

Social sciences:
Economics
Political science
Psychology
Sociology
History

Technology:
Agricultural science
Computer science
Materials science
Medicine and health care