Do we need tech levels?

Rigid tech levels have been present in the whole TA family. AFAIK they are an RTS legacy going back to Warcraft 2. But are they the best design option? A good RTS will present a large amount of valid build choices, but with tech levels the question is more 'when do I tech up' and not so much 'how do I tech up'. You have to tech up at some point, so is it a bottleneck in terms of player choice?

Might it improve the game to have a more nonlinear tech tree, like Starcraft Terrans? Don't really have the game mechanical mojo to answer that, so just throwing it out there.

The SC2 tech system would fit more in a single player campaign, not so much in a mp game. It would give unfair advantage.

How so?

I havent played Supcom2 but from what I've read its tech system seems kind of... :? I was thinking something more streamlined yet balanced and complex like Starcraft Terrans.

Chris Taylor said that they took out tech levels because low-tier units got obsolete. That's just because of bad design, you can still have tech levels and keep low-tier units useful, as with Warcraft or Starcraft Zerg.

First time guy plays, has nothing researched.
Other guy who plays, has everything researched already.

Unless it's in the game it's a bad idea, it's makes the game less competitive and it's unfair.

Maybe I'm confusing it with something else, I only played at the SP of SC2 but in SC1 you had no such thing as tech levels/skill trees.

So the SC2 system is really like that? Grinding to unlock the tech tree? Wow.

But obviously I'm not talking about any kind of system like that. Have you played Starcraft?

I think there is some confusion here between Starcraft and Sup Com.

Sup Com 1/FA did not have research, but it still had tech levels - you had to upgrade the factories to get to the next tier. Sup Com 2 had a research tree but it didn't carry over between games.

If you were talking about Starcraft, then ignore this post

I was actually thinking about this a bit. But I believe tech levels is still the way to go with this. In both TA and SupCom you build factories that had access to everything they could build from the start. It kept production simple and straight forward. Having to "unlock" units through the construction of some "tech" structure just doesn't seem like it would flow well at the scale this game is going to be at.

Oh, building upgrades, I thought of something completly different such as the unit unlocking system for starcraft 2.

I think that developers add building upgrades to make games last longer instead of just making the really good units (wich probably cost a lot too).

Or by building certain buildings to unlock more units, got it.

As long as it's fun and it works I'm fine with anything.

Doing it that StarCraft/C&C way with tech buildings would be impossible at this scale. You would either end up with people wasting resources building backup tech buildings on other planets, or (if limited somehow) give far too great an importance on single buildings.

Using a tech-tree system is still a possibility, but from my experience with SupCom 2 I can say that this is not the way. I constantly forgot to research because the main game and the tech tree are two different views. It's like players in StarCraft forgetting to build food/supply structures/units. It happens because it's a periodic thing and remembering to do something periodically is hard if your focus is elsewhere.

The SupCom (1) way of doing things flows much more naturally. Everything is in the main view and the system is based on a few key moments of decision making rather then forcing periodic manual work to reap the benefits of an automatically increasing system.

Another advantage of not using a tech-tree is that there are ways not to go up and even ways to go down in tech. It creates a much more dynamic battlefield that is not forced forward by a constantly increasing number counter.

Of course this does not mean that PA's system has to be quite as linear as SupCom's. There could be addons/upgrades for buildings that don't simply increase their tech level, but actually let them branch out in specialized directions for example. But that is up to the devs, as the right way for that greatly depends on the rest of the game.

The tech tree is what killed supcom2 for me, so I'll go with yes.

I like tech levels, to be honest. It gives you a good sense of progression and keeps engineers from being too powerful (you'd have to do some funky stuff with build speeds if you wanted to be able to use the same engineers for the entire game, because they'd need to be affordable enough to build at the very start of the game, but not be too powerful because by endgame you'd be pumping out dozens of them). I suppose it also, in a way, keeps the UI nice and clean - with no tech levels eventually you'd be playing hide and seek with build icons on your engineers. When in doubt, KISS.

Warning: Incoming essay.

Rigid tech levels are what seperate TA and SupCom from 'just being another RTS'. People have said already that these not being there in SupCom 2 is what ruined the game for them, albeit without much explanation. I'm going to try to explain that, and give some fun examples of why rigid tech levels make for a better RTS (in my opinion, in most cases).

Firstly, tech levels are simple. TA had 3, SupCom had 3 er 4, sort of. Having such strict levels meant that very few, very intuative clicks were needed to make the progressive jumps through the game. For example:

• Click on factory
• Upgrade to next teir
• Build units (next teir build options appear whilst factory is upgrading)
• Wait

This is different to other games, where to get significantly better units and structures, you have to build several extra structures and/or research many options - taking many more clicks and taking much more time that could be spent blowing **** up (i.e moving tanks around).

Secondly, tech levels are more tactical. Upgrading a tier is nearly always a gamble, you need just the right opportunity to do so. 'Gambling' like this in games is fun. It might be you have taken over most of the map and have spare resources, do you protect what you have, or upgrade and hope the enemy doesn't attack? You might be turtling and there's a gap in enemy waves, do you push back, or upgrade to a higher tech, or even try to do both, distracting the enemy from thinking you are upgrading? Sure these instances happen in games without rigid tech levels, but not to the same extent because researching upgrades does not 'freeze' a large proportion of your base because you cannot build other things from the factories that are upgrading and/or it costs a lot of resources over a long (seriously 30 seconds can lose you a match) period of time.

Thirdly: Scouting. This one is quite hard to explain and is what most people miss when thinking about this sort of thing. When you scout an enemies base, you ask yourself: "how much of a threat is this place" and "is it worth attacking" among other things. With a rigid tech system where all all of tech level 2 is clearly 'more powerful looking' or 'bigger' than tech level 1, and you can search for tech 2 factories, your answers will be very quickly answered. In a research based RTS, you have little way of knowing what upgrades have been completed, or what they are currently upgrading - you have to look at their ENTIRE base and take in 10+ structures to see where they are in their tech tree, rather than search for in-your-face high tech signs like engineers with 2 building nozzles rather than 1, or factories with 2 sets of arms rather than 1.

So now I've explained why I think the TA/SupCom system is best, I'm going to try to convince Uber that 3 levels is better than two (even if you have to push back your insane planned release date).

You start the game in T1. You can build a base, and send little robots out to scout and have little fights. This works well, and stops any nasty suprises very early on. When you want to do more cool stuff, like build long range artillery, gain the upper hand in weaponary, you jump to T2. In T2, you'd have the option to build stuff that is specifically good at destroying T1 units. This would force the other player to get to T2 as well. Getting both players to T2 in "the average game" allows most of the games units to be available in most games, this is good. T3 should be more of a risk (as T4 was in SupCom, even if it was a bit overpowered usually), and allows the building of game ending structures like nukes and allowing the ability to fling asteroids around and destroy planets and such. Including these game-ending structures in T2 could mean that:

• You don't see most of the games units because T2 = endgame.
• There is too much of a risk going to T2 so players stay at T1. Boring.
• When scouting, it is yes/no to advanced stuff, rather than 1/2/3.
• You can pop up highest-tech bases anywhere too easily.

There are more negative points, I'll add any extras I remember at the end of this post at a later time if I think of more.

Here are some examples of a 3 tech level system as I imagine it in PA, with the downsides of a 2 tech system explain after.:

1a. You have researched T2, which allows you to fly to moons and asteriods, but not use them as weapons. The enemy sees this and could choose to let you stay there, because you can't attack and are just getting resources. Once they have reached tech 3, and have the option of using those places as weapons, they could fly their, kill your units, and have the upper hand. Alternatively, they could fly their as T2 as well, to stop you getting the resources, but slowing down their chance of using those places to blow you up with.

1b. With a two teir system, either you have space travel to begin with, which in my opinion allows escaping/spreading through the map too easy too early on, OR you can fly to and use these places as weapons as soon as you get to T2. To me personally it seems like both of these systems have flaws, where fun, risk orientated gameplay could be inserted.

2a. Both teams rush to T2 as quickly as possible. Now that risk has been taken, they could either attack, risk getting to T3 then atttacking, or risk getting all the way to T3 endgame weapons. Lots of choices even after the T2 rush!

2b. Both teams rush to T2. Now they can either build T2 units, or endgame stuff. If the map is large, it is likely that before one team can atttack, the other team has ALREADY built endgame stuff and is firing nukes. This could be fun for the nuking team, but would piss off the guy that's built an epic arrmy.

3a. In the game there could be T2 units that are good against T1 units, but not T1 units that are good against T2 units. This, as mentioned before, encourages both teams to get to T2 and 'unlock' more of the game. Having large T3 units that are susceptible to huge swarms of T1 units gives the T1 units a good purpose again.

3b. Obviously if T2 was generally good against T1, then there would be little point building T1 units for the rest of the game. It's point is a bit more complex than this, but it should be clear that T3 could give T1 units a little boost.

I'd like to go a little off-topic here and say that higher tier tech factories should produce multiple units at once, rather than just faster like in (as far as I know) every other RTS. This would help stop your stuff getting destroyed 1 by 1 as it runs out, could make transporting units as soon as they are built easier, and would generally be more awesome.

I apologise for the terrible structure of this post, I'm making it up as I go along. If anyone has managed to read the whole thing, I hope I have convinced you to think about this like I do!

We don't necessarily need any kind of tech levels or tree at all. Let people make anything from the start. Large units would be too expensive to be a worthwhile investment early on due to the time it takes to construct them and their inability to control wide areas of territory. It works as long as things are balanced such that large units do not make small units obsolete. Likewise the late game strategies would naturally become viable once you have the economy to produce them without dying in the meantime.

Tech levels are OK as long as the higher-tier units aren't just lower-tier units but more powerful. They need to be the different unit roles.

I like the System in TA and SupCom because it was like taking the war to a next level (T1 - T3) and in the end it took the war to an insane level (T4 or Experimentals).
For me it was more kind of a awesome and fun way to reach the next level and build bigger and better machines. This is something like WW II: The Germans believed that the War will be changed for their good by building a better and more destructive Panzer, Rocket, Interceptor or else... it was a desperate act!
Or WW I the trench warfare. they searched for new technologies to end this stalemate! gas, Doppeldeckers, machinegun and bigger and better canons!!!!
So if 2 enemies are struggling and there is no winning because both are investing in the same amount of warmachines you were able to go nuts and build a very expensive unit or structure and stress the enemy with its completion. It was fun!

burntcustard has some really good points about tech levels.

Here are the highlights:

The gamble adds strategic complexity to the game which makes it more interesting to play. Players have to make decisions about upgrading, and they become more invested in protecting their higher tech-level factories.

Making the factories visibly transform lets other players see what they are doing, which will make them react to the other player's strategy and put more emphasis on intelligence, which also makes the game more interesting.

I completely back burntcustard's well thought out points.

I originally was in favor of a TA-style T1, T2, Experimental-like tech levels, but now that I've read his thing, I'm even more in favor of this style of gameplay (for all the reasons he listed)

He also didn't mention this, but one other nice bonus is that you can literally bomb your opponent back into the stone age in this system. With a tech-level system, you can focus your attacks on their higher-tiered tech facilities, rather than trying to crush all of their factories. This can buy you enough time to win the war, if you cripple their higher-tech war factories.

In light of burntcustard's suggestions, I'd like to make the following:

Tech Level 0
Basic tech, and planetary-confined technology.

Tech Level 1
Advanced planetary-confined technology.

Tech Level 2
Basic off-world/interplanetary technology (able to lift-off planets, etc.).

Tech Level 3
Advanced off-world/interplanetary technology (able to perform interplanetary travel). Players at this level can effectively manage/leverage economies spread across multiple planets within a single star system.

Tech Level 4
Basic interstellar technology (able to build fusion rocket emplacements on astroids)

Tech Level X
Advanced interstellar technology/Experimental technology, including teleportation / portal systems for faster interstellar travel. Players at this level can effectively leverage and manage economies spread across multiple star-systems.

So basically, with these tech levels, you have a clear distinction between players confined to planets, confined to planets and their moons, confined to a star system, and those that can freely travel between star systems... and beyond.

Thanks guys Actually re-reading my post again I've realised how all over the place it was.. oh well.

Ooh I hadn't thought of that, I like it! Although I think as many tech levels as you suggested might be pushing it a bit.. filling each of those with a set of units with unique roles could be tricky!

I think somewhere in my first post I suggested that the tech levels were:
1. Basic units and structures.
2. More advanced units and structures, and interstellar flight (so you can mine asteriods etc.)
3. 2 or 3 different super advanced units (not as insane as SupCom experimentals), teleporters, nukes, stuff that can shoot from moons to the planet, basically game enders.

Some people have suggested not having any tech levels.. although I think this should be considered, I don't think it would work very well.

Just addressing this specifically.

Even without explicit tech levels, you can still have something like them. See my post on logistics here. Right at the end I mention you get effective tech levels because you simply can't afford the more expensive stuff without the resource/logistic network to go with it. So don't count out no tech levels, it can be surprisingly similar to having tech levels.