Hi everyone,
There was a little bit of a mixup last week, so I ended up not uploading a post I had already written - but as a result, you’ll get a double post on research today.
The first part is about research generally and what you will be able to research:
To start with, I think I have mentioned before that I wanted to introduce research with 0.9 in order to allow for more specialisation of coop partners, and to create multiple options for playstyle/strategies more generally. With research being needed to unlock buildings, processes, and military advantages, players will have to choose a lot more what they are currently prioritising, with the benefit to any particular route depending on how much that approach will actually be used.
As an example, a player who currently has only 1 tobacco field will still benefit from building a cigar factory. The cigar factory may not run at perfect efficiency, and be a little expensive at first, but the balance of the cigar factory cost to the increased price of cigars will still yield a profit after a short time. Of course I could reduce the price of cigars or increase the price of the factory, but both of those would change the profit ratio of cigars whether the player has lots of tobacco or not. Alternatively, the introduction of a one-off cost of researching cigar factories will mean that investment makes a lot more sense the more tobacco is available to the player, with more tobacco making the investment considerably cheaper with each additional factory that the player will build.
Of course this also works well with exploration rewards and the new materials system described in updates 172 and 173: If a player finds lots of tobacco plants in one valley, and lots of iron mines in another valley, the decision where to expand to may be drastically different depending on whether they have already researched the cigar factory (or efficient iron mining) or not. Likewise, a player who has not decided on which direction to expand into may be swayed by finding the blueprints for the cigar factory in a chest along the way…
Likewise, having research options for the military (e.g. more health for your soldiers, or more damage for ranged units, etc) that can be researched will give players more options for what to prioritise at a given time, and, as will be explained in the next part - what to invest!
The second part is about how you will be able to research:
In general, research will be done in a research building (name tbd). As with most games, the player will be able to select one of the available technologies from a research tree, and the selected technology will be researched by the villagers employed in the building. Similar to fewer games, each technology will require a different input related to the technology. Some will merely have a gold cost, while others might require wood, iron, food, or some combination of resources.
This opens up a variety of options for both development and for play-styles. To pick up my earlier example of investing into your military, military investment so far comes only in 2 forms, of either building more military buildings, or hiring more soldiers. One costs gold and construction resources, the other costs gold and a continuous food supply. Of course that is very limiting. Maybe you are playing a game in which you have not found a lot of food yet, or need a stronger military to get access to more food - all while you have found ample supplies of other resources.
With each technology requiring slightly different inputs, this gives the player more options: investing, e.g. copper and nitrate into the research could improve the efficiency of your few soldiers until they are strong enough to take the next valley over, which has all the food you need.
Another advantage will be that relating input with the technology allows for players to be rewarded for what they enjoy doing. If a player particularly enjoys exploration, they will be able to find resources that can’t be produced by their villagers (e.g. a rare flower), which they can use to upgrade their own health, weapons, or storage space. Likewise, a player who enjoys base building may be able to invest large amounts of goods created by their villagers into even better recipes for their buildings, which will improve their profitability and military strength in the long run.
Of course, balancing this will not be easy, as the research needs to work well with the new materials, new production chains, and probability of spawns, but I am pretty excited to get into the thick of it.
Until next week!