research times and costs for different galaxy sizes

I was about to post pretty much the same thing, so if you hadn't guessed I completely agree. Playing even a medium sized game, it's not all too uncommon to more or less fill up both tech trees by the end. Although I've never played a large game with eight players or so, I can imagine that with all the extra resources and room to expand, everyone would just be fighting eachother with full tech trees by the end, kind of defeating the purpose of tech trees in the first place.

The idea behind a tech tree obviously being to allow a player to customize their forces based on their play style and whatever they think should be more beneficial to them ultimately. While ideally this would mean that you should up with different players playing very differently based on their research in the game by it's end, they'd both be playing with full tech trees by the time they fully engaged eachother. This would kind of make the only real relevance of their research being the racec they chose, and which technologies that race can research, as opposed to any real fine-tuning.

This could be solved like matthewfarmery said by scaling the cost of research with the number of resources/planets available in the game. Not only the costs would need to be modified, but I believe some of the effects as well. The best example is probably the number of capital ships. If their are a hundred planets and you can only have ten capital ships, then their impact is seriously reduced in large games. So perhaps the number of capital ships would increase by more per level based on the number of planets in the game, as well as the resources necessary for making that upgrade. Just a thought.

Why not just ask for a 'Research Cost high/medium/low' in the game setup screen. That would be a lot easier for Ironclad to implement and would maximize player choice.

How about infinite research?(short or long integer limited probably)

Say the ships and whatnot are fairly easy to obtain, you get command carriers and such inside half an hour, playable with all the units on as small a map as you can get. The abilities however are also easy to get, but toothless at the start, relatively speaking. You'd have research in any given field, the regen upgrade rate from command cruisers, extra range on the targetting boost, repair rates from the droids, then more general upgrades such as shields, armor and damage, all more or less unlimited. In a short game, you'd get all your units, and a level or two of comparatively weak abilities for the carriers. In a 100 planet galaxy, you could possibly achieve a couple hundred levels in something, maybe having command carriers that recharged shield and hull in a few seconds, or boosted the range to over twice the original distance with targetting. This way, you could truly advance your side the way you wanted to, you wouldn't need to scale anything to the size of the map or the duration of your playing style. You'd essentially be able to advance as long as you were playing, but still be able to obtain all types of things relatively quick.

You don't have the beta yet, do you?

That said, I like the general thrust of your ideas.

meh...

I think a never ending chain of techs lacks character, and if your concerned about techs becoming vanilla and everyone having them, then you need to be forced to make a choice, IE you cant have it all. Thus you want the techs to be more expensive not less.

Or I suppose you could put a final limit on how many total techs your allowed. Say if the game has 30 techs, you can only buy 20. Thus each player may have a different set of techs.

Yes I have the beta, that was a paragraph of supposition, not commentary on current workings. I can have a game over with against a single ai in a small solar system with just a few research centers. I'd have to try to delay the game long enough to use the later cruisers. I'd also run out of tech to research long before a 50 planet game in five systems is over, and it basically amounts to a full arsenal game before I finish conquering the first system. It would be kinda blah to be able to obtain all types of units fast, but we already do now on a big map anyway.

Scaling the tech rates to galaxy size is going to be a neat trick, if it's a good ai or you're against competent humans it wont even work. A four player game is half the resources for each individual that a two player game would be on the same map. You could work off the ratio and account for players as well, but then your tech advancement would be rapid whenever sides were taken out. If you don't, you've got a godawfully slow advancement in a crowded universe that doesn't fold fast to a few best players.

first off, I think scaling in general is a good idea, just the way to implement it and under what conditions needs to be discussed. personally, I would be hesitant to cut rates by half if the available ressources would be halfed, but I guess that is something that would need to be actually tested for fun.

another aspect that I say in this thread was the idea of forcing choice upon players. I have two examples - although not specifically with tech - how a choice is presented to players.
a) the hard choice as in Heroes of might and magic IV where the player had to choose between two possible units to build.
the soft choice, where - for an effective gameplay - a certain specialisatio is necessary. this I encountered a lot in rpgs and its personally the type I favour. it should be balanced in a way that it is possible and necessary to have a good combination of forces, maybe one that even builds on each others' strenghts, but requoires a selection of abilities - or in this case technolgies - to really select in order to be successful. now, what could this be? maybe if you research armor for frigates, then weapons and thrusters tend to be cheaper ressources which would in turn lead to someone having a force composed of relatively more (beware more not only) frigates than someone would have who did the same specialistion on cap ships.

in that example though the specific class should never be so strong as to kill its own counter. otherwise its just a way of training a uber unit (of course a good player would see the others' specialisation and upgrade the counters accordingly, so this sould not be so much of a great danger).

on a side note: is there any way of getting techwise espionage? like what techs the enemy has and what he is researching? would be interesting to evaluate what kind of counter attack he would technically be able to mount.

I like the idea of a game length setting that auto-adjusts the rates/costs of things, so if you want a short game things are cheaper/long game things are more expensive.

There's no espionage in Sins, but there's always expansion packs.