Alpha Centauri 2

Other Games => Racing the Darkness Megagame => Topic started by: Trenacker on August 16, 2025, 11:21:39 pm

Title: Tech Tree - Tier 1
Post by: Trenacker on August 16, 2025, 11:21:39 pm

The game development spreadsheet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1S8DrGjn1Htm_lO3VD4TkSDNZSLsjoBAz/edit?usp=drive_link&ouid=118092342676983150596&rtpof=true&sd=true) has been updated with a draft of Tier 1 of the modified tech tree. As mentioned elsewhere, I've got 256 technologies mapped (inclusive of the originals) across all tiers.

I used the same format (albeit transliterated to Excel) as Lemmy's digital implementation of the original tech tree. The benefit is that it tells what should be possible for a player at each tier.

Comments welcome.

Title: Re: Tech Tree - Tier 1
Post by: Trenacker on August 16, 2025, 11:34:41 pm

Research
Each base and certain tile improvements contribute research output toward technological and doctrinal advances that enable new construction or social choices.

Two types of discovery are possible in Racing the Darkness:
Technologies are discoveries that lead directly to material improvements or empirical knowledge about the physical world. These are practical advancements made mostly in laboratory settings.
Doctrines are sets of beliefs or teachings that combine theory, history, and practice, leading societies to change how they behave.

Put simply, technologies are useful facts that help you to make better things, whereas doctrines are useful ideas that help your society to perform certain tasks more efficiently and effectively. Examples of technologies include penicillin, transistors, and the recumbent bicycle. Examples of doctrine include the Social Contract, blitzkrieg warfare, and the "Broken Windows" theory of policing.

Each of the hundreds of possible technological and doctrinal advances in RtD is organized along one of nine interwoven research paths. Just like the scientists at Bell Labs, your approach to research is guided: you might not be sure exactly how your experiments will turn out, but you know enough to choose where to spend your energies in the expectation that you're barking up the right tree. Technological advances are often incremental: one breakthrough creates the foundation for another. Therefore, as in the original game, your research horizons will be hemmed by your ignorance, only expanding gradually with each new dram of knowledge gained. Factions receive bonuses for conducting research on the paths they prefer based on their ideologies, but players will find it necessary to pursue many paths in order to be successful.

Nine Research Paths
The nine research paths help players to make informed choices about what kinds of discoveries they wish to prioritize.

The Build path deals with advances in materials science and engineering. Discoveries along this path are most-useful for base-building and production.

The Discover path deals with the Newtonian and Terran life sciences, including descriptive neurology and psychology. This path unlocks important advances for faction health.

The Connect path features advances in information technology--computers, the data they process, and artificial intelligence. This path contains advances that boost overall research output, improve Probe Team performance, and help you to manage your Robot subjects.

The Explore track is about engagement with the Chironian physical and life sciences. This path helps a faction better understand Planet--and, perhaps, to better steward (or exploit) its secrets.

The Conquer set of technologies and doctrines has direct battlefield applications.

The Expand path is all about discoveries and thinking that facilitate population growth and mobility.

The Command path is about imposing social control over human subjects.

The Choose path deals with the ethical challenges of tomorrow: how to use different technology to reorganize society.

The Unity path is a short branch dealing with the Terran technologies that equipped the original mission. These technologies can be salvaged from Unity wreckage as well as researched in the classical manner.

Title: Re: Tech Tree - Tier 1
Post by: Trenacker on August 31, 2025, 03:41:11 pm

Made a few adjustments to the tech tree today to incorporate the contributions of Strategos' Risk.

• Less-Lethal Weapons, a Tier 2 Choose tech, was renamed to Less-Than-Lethal Weaponry and changed to a Unity tech, reflecting the presence of less-than-lethal options in the ship's armory.
• Changed Robotics to Robotic Labor, which better communicates the specific advance.
• Added the Connect tech Gnosis Computers to the tech tree as an intermediate discovery between Pre-Sentient Algorithms and Digital Sentience. This slows down the direct march to genuine AI, creating some additional space for Conservation-minded societies to develop high-performing computers without crossing the line to thinking machines. Prerequisites for Gnosis Computers are Pre-Sentient Algorithms, Emulation Environment, and Cyberethics. Gnosis Computers is itself a prerequisite for Digital Sentience and the mutually exclusive alternative, Doctrine: Disk Obedience.
• Added Mind Mazes to the tech tree as a direct progression from Deep Mapping, which I drew from the same post (https://smacworks.boards.net/post/131/thread). Deep Mapping, in turn, is made possible by advances in Fractal Engrammatics, the same technology that leads to Shared Dreaming. It is worth mentioning that the timing of this discovery on the RtD tech tree deviates from the history of Mind Mazes presented in OtL: whereas Mind Mazes precede Mind-Machine Interface in his retelling, they are well on the far side of it in mine, belonging to the same cluster of discoveries as the Data Wheel and Memory Expansion.
• Added Academic Hypnopædia as a Command technology that is directly discoverable after Neuropsych. This is a branch of the same limb concerned with Neural Resocialization. In theory, this technology, which concerns itself with learning, could appear in multiple places on the tech tree, including in the cluster for Portable Cognition, but I think it marks a logical stop-over on the path between mastery of neuropsychological principles and the practical "art" of imprinting new personality characteristics over old ones. There is a global benefit of +2% research output.
• Adcded Moral Hypnopædia as a Command technology directly descended from Academic Hypnopædia. Significantly, it comes after Neural Resocialization, suggesting that the convicts and super-soldiers subjected to ReSoc never received the latest and greatest in moral conditioning. Instead, Moral Hypnopædia grants a small boost to global faction happiness.
• Added Robot Cluster Control as a facility that can be built after the discovery of Teleoperations, an important technology that comes very early in the Build tree.