1. But "need" varies from time to time. Those bows aren't going to be very useful if you haven't researched bows. So you go research bows. Surprise, surprise, the RNG gives you bows that are designed for dragonslaying.
2. Again, usefulness is a situation-oriented trait. A tech doesn't have to do nothing to be useless, it just has to be ill-suited to the situation at hand.
3. I think we enjoy fundamentally different things in these games.... I think it makes no sense to have such a critical component of the game be left to chance.

B)If by "lairs" you mean dungeons, the random effect is mitigated by the fact that there will be a load of them spread all over the map. We're talking about a few turns' difference, max. You could conciveably spend months trying to get a needed tech (and that's assuming day-long turns!)

C)A skilled player basically is a mathematician...... calculating what to do and when to do it.

D)The part about making tech B work in a clever way is addressed by my previous comments: you can't make caltrops be effective against petrodactyls, no matter how clever you are.

"Chance" makes it sound as if the entire game hinges on 1 tech. The game is broken if thats the case. If for some reason you have NOTHING to deal with the current situation at hand then we are no longer discussing the randomness of techs but rather a serius game flaw. I

I also think we enjoy fundementally different things, and yet I believe both of us can be appeased fairly easy with this engine. You invest enough in a line of tech, you WILL eventually get what you need, however at a price. That is reality, you don't invest in a specific technology but rather you invest in solving a problem, whatever tech is born of your labor cannot be predetermined.

Hmm. I never heard that, but whatever. I will be extremely dissapointed if you can choose what hero type you are recruiting, as then whatever hero ends up being all around "best" will be the only type ever recruited.

Wait, how does volume mitigate the "evil RNG". Someone else in this thread pointed out a 30% chance doesn't mean it will happen 30% of the time.If you want a melee weapon for your paladin but you dont get it after months of dungeon raiding, how is that any less unbalanced? What if you found half a dozen other useful items, would you discard them? Or would you make the best of them? Now apply your answer to that to the tech discussion. Im hoping you see my point.

What about those of us that just want to have fun? I consider myself a decent AoW:SM player but I still have certain items that I like for more than thier value, certain troops that I use because I think they are neat, etc. If playing a game becomes something you have to plan ahead for signifigantly, than the issue becomes where does the planning give way for spontanuity. I guess in reality this arguement is more about preference, I just think mine fits the fantasy genre better.

If thats the ONLY tech you have, and you go against a hoard of petrodactyls, then you can no longer blame the game for your defeats. If your enemy has some kind of massive volume of a single powerful unit that requires "Special" counters, than the game is broken in soo many ways beyond the RNG.

It is more likely that youll face an army of mixed units and petrodactyls. If you didn't bring archers, and the petrodactyls are strong enough, then the enemy earned a victory and you need to lick your wounds and prepare a new strategy.

I certainly see what your trying to say, its just that your arguement hinges to much on unlikely extremes. Would it suck if the enemy empire used nothing but flying dinosaurs to attack you and you weren't prepared? Yea, but if we see that alot in game then...

Chance DOESN'T reward skill, you are correct, however you continue to hinge on the belief that the game is won and lost through tech, and thats simply not the case, not in the short run atleast. Your skill is rewarded when you figure out a useful way to defeat or avoid a problem that technology hasn't yet caught up with, your skill is rewarded when you take that new sword tech you thought was useless and utilize it in a creative way, and your skill will reward you when you outmanuever an otherwise overwhelming opponent. Your not thinking of skill when you speak of beelining to certain tech to counter your opponent, your thinking of meta-gaming. Think of the first time you played civ (if you ever did), there wasn't a rush to philosophy or gunpowder, just a deep and interesting "exploratory" game.

When my dire bears start getting cancer and I need to build hyper-advanced biology centers to cure them, then yes, I would wan't specified research. Howver, no one in the middle ages had a co-ordinated research effort. Its a tad unrealistic to have research at all, to be honest. The most realistic you can get though is random research, as people would simply have ideas and then get money invested in them, or the king would say "50 gold peices to whoever finds a better way to farm" and thats him investing in infastructure. The realism arguement is thus both flimsy, and in a fantasy game, innaplicable.

A game by paradox interactive had a similiar research engine in which you would simply direct research in a few directions, then hope for the best.

The closer to ideal the outcome is likely to be. You can flip a coin 100 times and get 100 heads, its just unlikely. I also think that being able to research multiple paths (which we can) and having much of the research be incremental, and therfore rapid, improvements will help. Without the game, I can't say, but the point is that it is unlikely that the game will have you wasting 50+ turns to get a new +1 dagger.

Thats fine, but I can't see your arguement holding up without extreme examples, hence the issue. If the enemy has a mixed force, and you are balanced technologically, but his arrows are +1 and yours aren't... I somehow fail to see the game breaking-ness...

The fun crowd makes up the vast majority of gamers, hence the reason they are called games. I see however that competetive gaming is more your interest, therefore perhaps stardock could make random techs optional? That would solve ALOT. I personally would be dissapointed to see them take them out however.

For clarity, I think this is something like the situation Scoutdog is trying to avoid:

"Oh crap, there is an invading army 10 turns from getting their catapults in range of my city. I'd better invest in another level of Masonry to get stronger walls to hold them long enough for my army to come back and defend me."

Two turns later..

"New masonry technology gives me better ROADS?!?! Now they can get in range in 5 turns instead of the 8 I should have had. FML."

That might be true enough, but the larger discussion just increases my hopes that the devs will stick to that early, barely-discussed goal of keeping mundane knowledge relatively simple and putting most of the knowledge-gain complexity in the magic system. I still really don't even want to see the syllable "tech" in the game UI; it would be like seeing a character in Steve Jackson's LotR films wearing a modern three-piece suit.

The last day or so of replies here make me wonder if what I really want is a fixed set of mundane 'techs' that most or all factions can start the game with, learn spontaneously, or gain via trade, gifts, or quests. 'Tech' improvement after that could be a semi-randomized reflection of how many people a sovereign sets to work using the given craft. The results could be nothing more than those boring little bonus-creep things, so minor that they don't get into basic reports to the ruler until they hit major milestones (i.e. one in ten 'advances'). That could leave the real focus of the game on applying 'simple' craft knowledge to build your mundane infrastucture and, ahem, mastering magic sufficiently to make a big difference in how your realm works and fights.

But in any event, I am pretty certain that techs will not be random, so WIlly can sleep a little easier.

I think randomness in techs--either in their actual cost to obtain, or in their results--should simply serve the purpose of preventing easy min-maxing.  That is, the randomness shouldn't be chaotic, else luck trumps strategy, or at the very least the player feels they have no real control over outcomes.  Which technologies one researches should absolutely have a profound, and relatively predictable, effect upon one's empire/kingdom and the success thereof, but I think it's okay to know only that "such-and-such improvement" will be complete in 4-6 turns.  You know it won't take forever, but if you're counting on "such-and-such improvement" to launch a surprise attack, you may end up waiting and missing the crucial moment.

Random techs and effects should be spice -- they shouldn't be a main dish.

I like the idea of a base line tech tree, that you can research "short bow" "claymores" "large axes" "crossbows" etc.

Or in another branch perhaps "copper, bronze, steel"

etc.

Off of those tech trees could be the random techs,  that modify their base components.  "range increase for short bows" combined with a lucky "speciatly short bow training center" for example might have you utilizing a short bow long after your oponents are working x-bows, and never having to work on the more advanced tech.

On the other hand,  just because your opponent has these uber short bowmen at the moment, there would be plenty of options to counter him.  Researching tower shields and tight formations could yield a unit that can hold their own against the bowmen.  If you don't have the resources to build tower shields there would always be the potential for a magical solution.  Warp wood,  missile immunity, wall of air, invisibility, things like that.

Just because your opponent has a particularly sharp pair of sisors,  doesn't mean your rocks won't still smash them. 

So as long as we can research fundametals to be able to function in a rock paper sissor environment, I think the idea of spiking the tech tree with hidden surprises that you get randomly as you are researching the base tech they are tied to is a fun idea.

Lastly, while I like the idea of fixed base techs, I'd like to see the tech requirements to unlock various things made random, and hidden.   Obviously you need a bowman,  a pikeman, and a horseman available from the beginning (or whatever the rock paper sisors basic is).  But what you have to have teched out in order to unlock x-bows could be varried, and random.  Thus maintaining that "exploration" of the tech tree we all had the first time we played civ 4 indefinately.  As long as anything you'd *need* to function is selectable, the rest could be tied in down the line in random orders.  From what they are saying there will be a *very* long beta.

Seeing as this is the direction I suspect they are going with it, I thought I'd make a list of what I think are fundamental techs that you need to be able to research.  (I think the random bonuses should just appear as researchable once you've met the req's, kinda out of the blue.  and let you research them or not as you see fit.  You should always know what you are going to get from the tech you are currently working on IMO.  or at least a general idea, like you had in master of orion)

So here is my list of inalienable techs.

Food, Population Growth, research, income, magic producing structures (If there are any), metalurgy, defensive structures, fancy racial techs, animal husbandry, and the 3+ basic military unit types  (as long as you can build a counter to anything that can be fielded). 

All of these should be researchable in their basic forms, in a reasonably predictable linear fashion.  Should they figure out how to make nickled bronze along the metalurgy route, that could be a cool side tech that can be totally random and would give a great boost when it showed itself.  But you aren't going to race down the tech tree to get nickled bronze because of how uber it is to dominate your enemies in the short game.  Just a cool thing that shows up and you alter your strategy to make use of it.

A tech tree like this would result in "what would help me the most now?" out of the available techs.  Rather than "what is my formula for teching?"

Lastly, if wonders (or w/e) were based off the randomly placed techs (that are always present) it would further prevent the forced tech choices just to be competitive.

And I don't want to play a game where some guy wins because the RNG decides it likes him today. I can get that experience by rolling dice.

And I don't want to play a game where some guy wins because the RNG decides it likes him today. I can get that experience by rolling dice.

With random spell research this is already going to be a problem.  But the replayability it will bring to a single player experience will be huge.  With the proposed 1 year beta, I would suspect there will be plenty of time to test the tech trees to the point where no one is going to get screwed by the random generator.

No matter what you do, the RNG is going to give one player an advantage.  That is unavoidable.  Attempt to nulify that and you eventually wind up with chess.  A completely equal playing field, equal resources, and no real tactical advantage other than who moves first.

So keeping that in mind, the goal should be to ensure there are enough cool things the RNG manages so that you wind up with a solid bell curve of cool stuff.  Very very rarely you are going to get totally boned, or your opponent is going to get the gold mine.  This can happen in any 4x game based soley off starting location.  But there are cool things that can be done with that given the length of time we have to test the game.  What if people with crummy starting locations get better tech tree bonuses?  It doesn't have to be all random, but wouldn't it be cool if the tech was based off of what you would reasonably need?

For example, you find yourself starting on a small isolated continent.  The sailing tree gets loaded with goodies for you, and stuff for your troops that might wind up giving them bonuses like the lizard men had in MoM. (being able to water walk your army)

You find yourself On a huge continent surrounded by other civs.  The early military,trade, and expansionist techs might get loaded with goodies for you.

Just a thought. It would require a LOT more code than a random tech tree, but it would be pretty cool and if the beta is going to be a year, this would be a cool thing to have!

I agree with you on the time is money front.  But not so sure where you are getting "notoriously unreliable".  To my knowledge there has never been a non-morpg game that has undergone anywhere near this length of a beta, let alone a public one.  Secondly, I cannot think of a single game that attempted to alter anything based on the qualities of your starting location.  It would be a nightmare to code for sure.

And no, you don't wind up with a no strategey at all effect, you wind up with a fluid strategy effect.  Provided you have the basics as a guarantee.  You just aren't guaranteed to know your entire strategy before you fire up the game.  The great part about implimenting a random system though, is it would be very easy to have a check box to opt out.

Yep infinie tech and random based is great , so far in 4x games alwys you got at some point to a moment when your reserarch didnt matter anymotr cause it was maxed wich was tottaly unrealisitc and unbalanced for reasearch focused parties.