Reorder the science pack tiering

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Reorder the science pack tiering

Post by Lav »

TL;DR
Reorder the science pack tiers to match the order in which they're obtained during normal gameplay.
What ?
At present moment, military science packs become accessible long before production and blue science. However the game considers the military science "tier" to be above not just blue, but production as well. This results in techs that require blue/production science being higher in the tech list than pure military techs, which is kinda annoying and counter-intuitive.

So the suggestion is to change the science pack tiering to:

Red - Green - Military - Blue - Production - High - Space.
Why ?
To improve the accessibility of science screen.

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Re: Reorder the science pack tiering

Post by eradicator »

I think it would be far easier to simply add a a requirement for the tech that provide the specific science pack.

E.g: "Advanded oil processing (AOP)" should require "Advanced electronics (AE)" because AOP requires blue science packs which can not be made without AE unlocking the recipe. So AOP becomes "yellow" on the tech tree even tho it's impossible to research it before AE.

This should be done automatically when "building" the science tree. So if any dev/mod ever forgets to add proper requirements it's automatically fixed. (Or just make the loading produce an error so they're forced to fix it)
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Re: Reorder the science pack tiering

Post by JohnyDL »

eradicator wrote:I think it would be far easier to simply add a a requirement for the tech that provide the specific science pack.
Oddly Eradicator I said the same thing way back viewtopic.php?f=6&t=47945 thread even has a mod that provides those dependencies though I didn't spot that at the time

As for the issue of ordering science packs maybe it should be dynamic, based on the amount of automation you have for each pack or the amount of each pack in logistics or similar I think in some ways though blue purple and grey being in the wrong order is legacy from being introduced relatively recently and if I were to have them in my preferred order grey would go last because the things that require grey are the least likely thing I'd want to research.

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Re: Reorder the science pack tiering

Post by eradicator »

JohnyDL wrote:
eradicator wrote:I think it would be far easier to simply add a a requirement for the tech that provide the specific science pack.
Oddly Eradicator I said the same thing way back viewtopic.php?f=6&t=47945 thread even has a mod that provides those dependencies though I didn't spot that at the time
When you said "way back" i was kinda expecting at least a year in the past. I've had this on my to-do-list for some time too. It should be fixable by a semi-complex function that just walks through all technologies and adds requirements as nessecary.

Though i just realiszed that i have no clue what "order or tiers" the OP (or you) are talking about. The order that the bottle item-icons are displayed on the tech screen looks like they're sorted by the .order = 'string' in the item prototypes. So i'm guessing this is about the order in which they're displayed on the list of the left side of the tech screen(?) which is determined by the .order = 'string' on the technology. My guess is that that order is mostly historically grown. As nobody memorizes all order strings on all technologies. It looks like they're mostly grouped by theme, and for multi-stage technologies they're all next to each other. So "lab research speed 6" quite high in the list despite it requiring high-tech science probably becaues "lab speed 1" is quite cheap, and they have the same order.

I like the current pack order though [red-green-blue] is "the basic stuff", followed by [grey-purple-yellow] "the additional stuff" and white. The difference between the two groups is that RGB require each other while GPY do not. Meaning that a research that requires "blue" will always also require red and green, but GPYW can occur in any configuration.

Dynamic display is often bad for GUIs. The player doesn't expect things to randomly swap back and forth, and even if that was solved...there isn't really a good metric to measure which is most important to the player right now.
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Re: Reorder the science pack tiering

Post by Xeorm »

Are you sure it's above production? A quick glance at the science screen seems to show the opposite. Military is above blue, but not purple.

As is, I kind of agree, but also think the actual best solution is to get rid of military science. It's out of place in so many ways, including this one.

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