Technology

This is an article about the technology process in MCT. It is part of the game concept.
More about products which depend on technology levels in the products article.

The development of technology is splitted into technology levels. Each research field can have it's own progress of TL development. But new products needs the same TL for each research fields they depend on. At the start the player can produce easy products of one research field with TL1, but if he want to use more advanced products of a higher TL which use combinations of research fields, he has to increase the research points in all related research fields first to get the required TL overall.

The process of technology development is related to research with hardware, software, advertisements and drugs. The possibilities to handle the technology development are related to the features of research and company investments of the main game concept. To remind our self, technology companies have a TL depending on the race of the company owner, companies of the mass control market have TLs in different technology fields depending on their collected research points by technology companies.

Technology on earth

The technology development on earth begins with an introduction in relation to the game story. The player has existing research knowledge of the player. This knowledge is the base for the first TL.

Then the first TL contains a set of simple random products. The max. amount of TLs does not depend on a specific planet, but in the later game process it gets more attractive to trade/expand to other planets.

Notes for calculations of the technology development

A mathematical function can calculate the development of research points / the speed of the research process in relation to other developments. The first TLs should need less new research points than higher TLs.

To realize that, the whole market development must be depend on the research process. Higher TLs slow down the research process of all companies, because they need more research points to get the next TL. This needs more investments in research by other technology companies to keep the research speed of the own company. To get more money for that, the player has to produce / sell more and more products with a higher TL.

Higher TLs of technology companies, who make higher product TLs in the own company possible increases the consequences of swapping company ranks in the related technology marked. The player has to do more work on changing investments in technology companies with a higher rank if a technology company loses a rank.

The product TL development might be easy with products using one research field only, but if a product needs more than one higher technology TL, it needs more work to keep the TL development synchronously with big differences by swapping ranks in different technologies. Products which needs different TLs in research fields are TBD because they might increase the game complexity too much.

Technology on other planets with more races

The technology development gets more complex with a mixed market which contains more than one race. Each race has it's own TL for technology research overall. The speed of each technology research field depends on the race in related technology companies. If you have ten companies of the race with the highest TL overall, you get the fasted progress in research for your own product TL.

But this might be too expensive if you reach a new planet, because your own income related to your own product TL is to low for investments in high TL technology companies. You can invest more in companies with lower technology TL but they might change their TL later, because the technology markets improve their skills over a certain time more and more or not.

It depends on the new market rank of the related technology company. If a company loses a lot of rank points and/or have a low rank overall the probability is higher that a company reduces it's TL. Higher ranks and/or higher wins in rank points can increase the probability to get a higher TL in the related technology company. The lower or higher TL might be introduced by another race, but technology companies of a mixed market can use TLs of other races.

The highest TL of other races on a new planet depends on the current player TL. The difference between player TL and the new top TL will be calculated with a probability for a negative difference and a probability for a positive difference. If the negative difference is higher than the positive difference, the top TL on the new planet will be lower than the current player TL and vise versa.

The other entry TLs of races of a new planet will be one or two points less than the top TL. The race entry TLs will be spread randomly for the available races on the new planet.