Friday Facts #254 - No research queue for you

[bobingabout]

What we're actually getting is a compromise, somewhere in the middle. You pick the current researching technology as normal, and then the things that it unlocks appear in the list coloured yellow, so you can choose up to 7 more, for a total queue of 8. This is what was advertised back in a previous FFF and that's the current implementation of it in 0.17 master branch.

Just to clarify, you can still choose, as your 2nd queued research, something from the "green" nodes that aren't down the tree from the first one? Like early on I can queue up automation, turrets, and lights?

You can select from any available research, the yellow ones just indicate what would be available after what is currently researching (and already in the queue), and are unlocked to be added to the queue.

[mrvn]

I like the way this is solved in FreeCiv. You have a research tech and a goal. The tech is what you are researching now/next and the goal pre-selects the next tech to research. The research dialog still pops up after every tech and you can freely choose what to research. The goal just suggests what to research next.

And then you can turn off that the research dialog pops up automatically and it will just research automatically towards the goal.

[Zavian]

I like the way this is solved in FreeCiv. You have a research tech and a goal. The tech is what you are researching now/next and the goal pre-selects the next tech to research. The research dialog still pops up after every tech and you can freely choose what to research. The goal just suggests what to research next.

And then you can turn off that the research dialog pops up automatically and it will just research automatically towards the goal.

Imperialism 2 did something similar. Very useful in a game that doesn't display the tech tree as a tree. Less needed in Factorio, but still useful for players who want to mark what their next tech objective is, so they forget between sessions.

[HalfPastZulu]

For all who ask to make queue as option: how do you see managing researches in multiplayer for people with different settings?
PS. Personally, i'd like to have queue too.

I know this is a late reply but oh well...

Every good multiplayer game has a team leader or game leader usually the one who created the game instance... That one person should be the only person able to research anything and they should be able to pass that ability on to another.

So keeping personal preferences on whether to queue or not still works.

having 10-20 people all be able to access the research at the same time isn't very smart anyway.

Any group of people playing co-op should be able to sort out who is allowed to pick/change research. Since that should be the normal case for friends or small groups playing together, there is no need for the game to default to only one person being able to choose research. (Co-operating that way is part of playing co-op. If only one person can choose research, what happens if that player goes afk or loses their internet connection, etc?) For larger groups where you might want to limit which players can choose research, you can already do that using the permission system.

Honestly, research isn't the co-op part of the game. Regardless of how many are on the team only one thing gets researched at a time.

Yeah, so losing connections and such happens, usually the lead gets handed off to someone else soon as they get dropped, its no big deal as you stated since they are friends.