Remove Tech Randomization from Science

[FairlySadPanda]

About the PR

Kills randomized tech. You can research anything you've unlocked.

Why / Balance

Imagine if, when buying things from Cargo, it gave you a random thing out of a set of things rather than the specific item you bought. The key output of an entire role being randomized is not fun.

Randomized tech ("Stellaris Tech", as Stellaris works similarly enough and I also hate its implementation of research) is a design trap. There's an entire system of tiers and unlocks that theoretically exists but it can be essentially summed up as "shit that is an aside to if the loot fairy said yes to what techs you have available".

You can't design anything for Science to actually build or unlock that is important, because you can't guarantee Science will ever see that tech, because it's a dice roll unless you're rolling via an exploit or luck.

The code probably supports having a full, Civ-style tech tree of ten or more tiers, which would at least allow the RD and their crew to have goals and build toward something during the round.

Technical details

Changelog
🆑

• tweak: Randomized science tech choices have been removed. Research whatever you have the pre-requisites for.

[FairlySadPanda]

Tidy-up. Restrained my tidy-up urges to this function only.

[MACMAN2003]

you are a hero

[EmoGarbage404]

so sad that fairlysadpanda died of ligma

[FairlySadPanda]

(Science design in a nutshell, for folks that don't read the Discord - fyi for folks that propose this in the future)

[MACMAN2003]

why was this closed?

[potato1234x]

why was this closed

[FairlySadPanda]

Because it's a mald PR, obviously

[MACMAN2003]

it's still a good change imo and i think that even if it's a mald pr it shouldn't be instantly closed, a non-random tech tree would mean science would be actually useful instead of just exploding all the time

[Snowyypanda]

i sense beef and spite-pr closing, so sad that we've devolved into this it was actually a good change

[EmoGarbage404]

there's no beef to infer i literally had a conversation with the author and we discussed the changes here, the intended design of the research system, and other stuff.

You can read it all publicly here.

i sense beef and spite-pr closing, so sad that we've devolved into this it was actually a good change

please spare the holier-than-thou attitude when there is literally nothing to be creating fake drama about. The author literally admitted that they made the PR out of spite and said i was free to close it. They literally posted the relevant screenshots which everyone seems to be pretending are invisible ig.

[Hmeister-real]

even if it is a spite PR, it was a good PR.

o7

[FairlySadPanda]

Yeah so as the conversation Emo linked showed, Science research is not supposed to unlock anything important to the round. The reason why it's random is either to discourage designers from making useful techs or to encourage variance.

I've covered my overall thoughts on Science here so I can point future malding there space-wizards/docs#188 and will just not play Science anymore, given its chief point (research) is literally designed to be unreliable and low-impact.

Just break into Science and move their machines to the front of Cargo, lmao.