Jordan Kouzmanoff
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Dev Diary #9: Technology
🕑 Added 2022-06-18 18:40:46 +0000 UTC
Hello and welcome to the 9th development diary of Grey Eminence!
This time around, we’ll be taking a look at technology, the system through which we model scientific and social progress in the game. Grey Eminence's 600-year span saw the emergence of numerous game changing inventions and ideas, so managing your country’s technological progress will be pivotal in ensuring your country’s long term success.
Techs
The technology system consists of numerous individual techs (currently ~300, but this number is not final), each with its own unique conditions for invention & spreading. We strive to make the technology system meaningful, so we’ve purposefully avoided adding techs that offer only passive stat bonuses. As such, most technologies in Grey Eminence either expand existing mechanics (e.g. unlocking a new building) or give access to altogether new ones (e.g. political parties).
Techs in Grey Eminence exist at the tile level. In other words, we track whether the population of a given tile (as a whole) has access to each individual technology in the game. This allows us to add both tile-level and country-level mechanics to techs, which in turn makes for an interesting simulation of historical progress: for example, a single locality might be the first to discover a new production method, and the resulting economic boom could make this locality a production center that will persist long after the technology has spread to other locations.
The conditions for inventing a new technology vary significantly, but are usually tied to the presence of specific buildings, natural resources, previous technologies, or people with a certain level of literacy. We’ve mentioned previously that we don’t intend on arbitrarily gating techs behind fixed years (e.g. the classic “can’t spawn the printing press before 1550” problem), and we stand by that commitment. Instead, we’re balancing the speed of progress through the tech trees by 1) making techs require other techs to be discovered & 2) soft-limiting the rate at which new techs can be discovered. Obviously, it will be difficult to find the right balance between ensuring a historically-plausible rate of progress and ensuring players don’t breeze through to nuclear weapons in 1800, but that’s a balance we are determined to strike.
Once a tech has been discovered in a given tile, that tech’s tile-level mechanics are unlocked. For example, a tech that gives access to a new building will allow you (or any of your elites, or the population itself) to construct that building in that tile only. From then on, that technology will start to spread. Technology spreading can happen via multiple avenues: close geographic proximity, trade, immigration, and espionage are some of the methods available. In general, the requirements for spread are more lenient than the requirements for invention, so while being the first to discover a tech might be lucrative in the short term, it’s difficult to retain such advantages over longer time periods.
After a given technology has spread through your country sufficiently, you can choose to adopt it. This unlocks that tech’s country-level mechanics. Going back to our previous example with buildings, adopting a building-enabling tech allows you (and all actors in your country) to construct that building anywhere, even if that location hasn’t yet discovered the tech in question. Unlike techs themselves, tech adoption is tracked at the country level, so once a country has adopted a given tech, it will not lose it, even if circumstances cause it to drop below the adoption threshold.
One important consequence of tech adoption is that it greatly increases the speed at which the tech can spread (both internally and externally). This leads to an interesting choice: you can purposefully not adopt a tech immediately, so that you slow down its spread to rival countries. That deprives you of the country-wide boons, but lets you make use of the tile-level benefits for a longer time. Of course, progress cannot be withheld forever, so technologies are adopted automatically once they’ve spread to an overwhelming majority of a country’s tiles.
Looking at the medicine branch of the science tree, we can observe the (far from finalized) progression towards vaccines. The first vaccine to be developed was the smallpox vaccine. It came about after careful study of the folk practice of smallpox inoculation, a tradition that originated in 15th century China.
Tech Trees
Techs in Grey Eminence don’t exist in a vacuum. Instead, they’re grouped together linearly into tech trees that revolve around a common topic. As of right now, we have a total of four tech trees: economic, military, science, and social. Each tech tree will be getting its own dev diary later down the line, but for now we can reveal that the trees are made up of a number of parallel branches, where one tech usually leads into another in (roughly) the order those innovations happened in real life. Of course, the relationship between techs isn’t always linear. Sometimes, a single tech might lead into multiple others. In a few rare cases, individual techs can be so groundbreaking that they lead to techs in other branches, or even in other trees.
The tech trees are your gateway to interacting with the technology system. Through them, you can observe your country’s current progress, adopt any tech that has spread sufficiently through your country, and view the invention/spread requirements for whichever tech has caught your fancy. What’s important to note is that your agency as the Grey Eminence is to facilitate the conditions for new techs to emerge (assuming, of course, that technological progress is on your agenda). These conditions may sometimes be at odds with your country’s stability, especially for more radical techs like socialism or atheism, so progress is not always a net gain (especially in the short term).
As you’re probably aware, Grey Eminence’s final century saw the rise of state-sponsored research, where individual private inventors were no longer the driving force of progress in certain fields of study. Techs like jet engines & nuclear weapons don’t spread in the same way that the printing press does, but they’re also much easier to adopt once discovered; after all, you don’t need your entire country’s population to be aware of nuclear fission in order to make a bomb. It is during this final century of the game that espionage becomes a make-or-break mechanic, but that’s a story for another time. In general, the majority of techs are concentrated in the age of industrialization and onwards, so the first few centuries of gameplay won’t feature the same cutthroat tech arms race that will eventually dominate the world. That’s not to say it won’t be important; rather, it won’t be such a major determinant to success in the opening centuries of the game.
Moddability
So far, we’ve described the inner workings of the technology system without going too deep into the actual content it’ll feature. The good news is that we’re tailoring invention & spreading to be modular, so you’ll be able to attach nearly any conditions to it, even new mechanics or data categories you’ve created yourselves. Adding content-style changes is pretty straightforward and can be done through the world editor, while making system-level changes will require diving into the world of C#. While we’ve made the effort to include as many conditions and triggers as possible (even those that we won’t use in the base game ourselves), it’s a big endeavor and we won’t be able to cover everything, so depending on how you want to modify the tech system, you may have to create new connections from scratch. We’re sure you’ll come up with great new uses for the system - or maybe you’ll replace it with a more traditional point accumulation-style tech progression just to mess with our sanity - but in any case we can’t wait to see you guys in action. The tech system is one we’ve dedicated a lot of performance budget to, so depending on your modding needs you might discard it to allow for more performance-intensive mechanics elsewhere.
That’s all for now! Keep an eye out for the next dev diary on June 4, and until then make sure you’ve joined our Discord and Subreddit, and follow us on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Thanks for reading!
