Fwurg

[Brend]

I have recently constructed a Genealogical Archive for the Veolian race.

As the archive boosts only a single race, the original proposal included the option to upgrade the archives to include more races. Now, I wish to upgrade it for the hemet veolians, and later on the twi'lek. As I see it now, an extra technolgy purely to allow upgrades might be overdoing it, but the upgrade should have significant costs.

I propose a cost of 500 , 500 and 500 per upgrade. This would net out at a tax-value of around 1250 assuming that a product costs 0.75 (the maximum value that can be extracted from it through tax-sets), which is 250 more than half the cost of the base archives.

Please evaluate and criticise.

[Chriz]

I agree that another tech is not necessary. I proposed the same values when I discussed it with Brend. In my opinion we do not need more limitations since the archives are expensive enough.

[Fedor]

You get the same effect again, but probably applied to a smaller segment of your population, except that it doesn't take another zone.
I think the cost should be similair and 1250 value seems reasonable.

[Mercury]

I've looked at the Genealogical Archive and I think a price of 250 , 500 and 500 is more reasonable. This also fits more closely with the "upgrade is half price of actual zone" cost.

I would however like to require a tech for a second upgrade to the archive. As a general rule, zones can be upgraded only once without technology, and in line with my previous post, I'd also like to keep this on the same level as everything else. I would say this technology should cost roughly 1000 which would take a minimum of 2 turns to complete.

[Chriz]

The idea is that the original archives are already balanced for giving 1 % extra population growth. It is not a normal zone and they are not normal upgrades.
Requiring an extra tech for the second upgrade makes it convoluted since this would mean you would need one as well for the third, fourth and fifth? I see no use for those extra technologies, making the 'upgrade' a little bit more expensive as we proposed is much easier.

Basically you are researching a new 'tech' to get the information of the next race by spending the 500 , 500 and 500 .

[Mercury]

That's the idea yes, extra upgrade above one (! first one is techless) requires an extra technology. If you want four races, I'd propose building two zones instead of investing in two technologies.

If that's too convoluted, alternatively why not simply say "just one upgrade"? That's the simplest and most consistent solution, but I think Brend really wants at least two upgrades on this zone so...

[Fedor]

Everyone is going to put the first building into their biggest race, and each subsequent one is less of an advantage.
Furthermore it seems more of a roleplay thing to have more than 2 races and for min/maxing you would take 2(1?) race. Now you're punishing people for having more races whilst the advantage comes from having more population.
Point being that it is not a big advantage to have another 2 levels in genealogical archives.

[Mercury]

All proposals here punish having many races. Mine is no different in that. Actually, for 2 races, mine is cheaper than Chris and Brend's proposal.

I am not worried about the exact cost so much however. I'm concerned with consistency. No zone allows infinite upgrades on a single zone. The fact that more than one is allowed at all is already exceptional, and more than two is mostly just theoretical.

[Brend]

I would rather see the Genealogical Archives be handled like a special project that costs a zone, rather than a zone that increases population growth.

I have no problem with researching extra technologies, and I can assure you that any reasonable price will be met by my faction. The point is that I don't think that we should handle special projects that use a zone as if they were zones. They will be doing weird things, and this will be awkward to fit into the 'normal' system of zones and upgrades.

If we go with the technology route; it might be interesting to see whether this could be done as a 'technology per race' instead of a 'technology per upgrade'? This might offer later technologies branching of the archive tree some more footing. Though it would increase the number of technologies, it would be more in line with how technologies in the terraformation family work. This might require refactoring the current archives tech into two: the base archives, and the tech for the Veolian race.

(The other option would be to require a zone per race -- but this was distinctly not the idea I had in mind when I designed the archives. I was "Oh cool; instead of just claiming I have it, it would be nice to actually dedicate a whole zone to it, so I have something to show for it.")

What do you think of this?

[Mercury]

The split per race would work for me. It'd also allow other worlds with the same race to benefit and share research, which is good!

[Brend]

Very well, I shall post the proposal here when it's done. It's basically just rehashing the costs; I foresee no issues.

[Brend]

Splitting the research into two parts was easier said than done, unfortunately.

As the Genetic Lineage Analysis isn't that expensive, I couldn't split the cost of the research over the Base Archives and the Veolian race upgrade. To this end, I have shifted some of the costs onto the upgrade construction, as I see it as more than only improving a zone. Building such an upgrade entails the collections of samples from the population, screening such samples, and other things not directly related to the zone's infrastructure.

I have started out with the assumption that an upgrade would cost 250 , 500 and 500 (as per Mercury's proposal), and requires a tech cost of 1000 .

In the current situation:

The GLA tech costs 1000 ,
The Archive costs 500 , 1000 , 1000

In the new situation:

The GLA tech costs 1000 (note: you get a single racial upgrade tech for free with the GLA tech),
The Base Archive costs 250 , 500 and 500 ,
Each racial upgrade costs 250 , 500 and 500 ,
Each racial tech costs 1000 .


The idea is that (the base archives+one race) have the same costs as the current situation. For each extra race, the costs are (1000 for the tech + 250 , 500 and 500 for the upgrade) as proposed by Mercury.

I would like to place the note that we should not put to much emphasis on the 'racial techs' as these might create a split in the tech tree, as everyone wants his special 'racial boosting techs'. This is distinctly NOT my idea, and I would advice anyone thinking of basing a tech on one of the racial techs to take a step back, and ask whether this tech is actually related to a the race, or if it's related to a cultural value, racial characteristic or can just be done in a generic way. In my opinion we should try to keep technologies generic but interesting (a difficult proposition).

What do people think?

[Mercury]

Since nobody objects, I am hereby approving the proposal by Brend. Brend, since it is your proposal, could you put it on the Wiki? Once its there, you can build it immediately.

[Brend]

Done and done.