Research Solutions

I've been struggling with the concept of research in Bellicose. Research has to be a long process. It has to be a process that takes hours for the smallest of projects, days for the medium sized ones, and weeks for the largest projects. First, let me describe how the research project will work.

When looking at the technology tree, you can't see items near the top, but you can see what's coming up soon. For example, if you've just developed (or bought/stolen) the technology of light-weight alloys, you can see that the next technologies based on this would be lightweight personal armor, and flying vehicles that can accelerate faster (due to the lighter weight). Further, the research tree will be designed so that at times you can see one or two generations up. Continuing with the above example, you could see that after the lightweight personal armor is developed, you could then start working on personal flight suits.

So you've decided what you want to work on. You now need to find out what is needed to develop these technologies. This is accomplished by accessing the House Computer. Normally, only one person has access to the House Computer, and that would be the House Leader. Only the House Leader can grant Computer Privileges to another member of the House. By accessing the House Computer, the computer determines that you need approximately 15 tons of high grade iron based on the research facilities you currently have. (The computer also suggests that upgrading the research lab would make testing more efficient and would drop the requirements to 12 tons.) The computer can process approximately a little more than half a ton per day, so in about approximately 9 days the process will be perfected.

Each technology being researched will be broken into stages. Simple technologies only need 3 or 4 stages, while complex ones can require hundreds of stages. Think of these stages as "betas". The computer creates a beta, examines its flaws, then scraps the current beta and builds another one, a better one. This is why the resource requirements are so high. The time between each stage also varies, but generally, the more stages, the shorter the time period. The computer will tell you how many stages it expects, how long between each stage, and how much resources are required for each stage.

Time for another example, before we get ahead of ourselves, using our example of lightweight alloys. If you had a basic research lab, the computer may tell you the following:

Project: Light Weight Alloys
Estimated Stages: 5
Resources Per Stage: High Grade Iron, 3 tons
Estimated Time Per Stage: 43.2 hours

Total time: 216 hours (9 days)
Total Resources: 15 tons

Suggestions: An advanced research lab can decrease the stage time to 38.5 hours, resulting in a total time of 192.5 hours (about 8 days).

This is something that your House decides would be a good technology to have. They come to this decision based on the facts that there are many technologies who's roots like in lightweight alloys. In addition, the costs for 15 tons of HG Iron are considerably less than what the government is charging on this patent (I'll go into more detail on this shortly), so developing it in-house would be more economic as opposed to spending more for an immediate technology.

Later in the game, other facts things that could influence the decision would be the fact that no other House owns a patent (i.e., has developed) on the technology and that other Houses have begun research on it. Technology races are an important aspect of House Politics.

Patents mean something slightly different in this world. Having a patent on a technology does not give you exclusive rights over it. Rather, it merely means that you have the technology and may sell it. When a new technology is developed, the House must decide what to do with it. Obviously, they'll put the technology to immediate use, whether that means developing a new project, or using the new technology as a step in a larger ladder for another technology. The first House to develop a technology is in a special position. They can immediately opt to sell the technology to the government, and as with anything concerning the government, receive a large payoff. When a technology is sold to the government, it becomes available to all Houses to purchase, at a price of approximately 25% to 33% percent of the payoff to the developing House. In other words, if you sell a technology to the government for $100k, all other houses may then buy it at somewhere between $25k and $33, depending on the technology.

There is also the option of a grace period between the sellout and the release of the technology for general sale. During this grace period, the government will "sit" on the technology, and not release it to the other Houses for sale. The longer the grace period, the less the government will pay for the technology. The benefit of the grace period is that during this time, you will be the only House with that technology (provided that no other Houses developed it and completed it at the same time you did), meaning that you can sell a new product (plasma guns, for example) to a market with no competition, and you will be guaranteed government funding. The disadvantage is the fact that the longer the technology is held from the government, the more of a chance that someone else will develop it and begin selling it to other Houses. If the technology is released by another House prior to the grace period ending, less Houses will purchase the technology/product from you. Besides, the longer the grace period, the less the government will pay for the patent.

Human Intervention

Right now, research is pretty boring. There's not much more to it other than walking up to the House Computer and selecting "Research this technology" and waiting for it to finish. Blah. Boring. This has been my problem for awhile now: how to spice up research. I had originally intended being a Scientist to be a full-time role in the game, but you can't really make it interesting. I mean, what would players do? Log in and play connect the dots for an hour in a vain attempt to simulate research? So I took out the role of research scientist and decided to leave it up to the computers.

Then it hit me. In Bellicose, many things are controlled by computers. This is, after all, a persistent world, and players won't always be on at all times, so many tasks will need to be automated. The way I've balanced things is to make sure that all things that are automated will be done sufficiently only. Namely, any job completed by computers will be mediocre at best. If you request a delivery truck and the job is performed by a computer, the delivery may fly straight through an enemy camp rather than steering around as any human would.

The same concept will be applied to research. Basically, near the beginning of each stage, someone with access to the computer has the ability to evaluate and adjust the computer's attempts. In game, this will consist merely of walking up to the computer and standing at it for something like 60 seconds while your character examines the computers work and makes adjustments that may increase the findings. What this will result in will be a drop in the time per stage by up to 35% and/or a decrease in resources required. Namely, if each stage of research takes 10 hours, having someone Evaluate and Adjust during one of the stages could hack off up to 3 hours for that stage.

Applying this to the full picture, if someone logs in during each stage of the project it can vastly decrease the amount of time it takes to research a technology. The more stages a project has, the more chances to have a human intervene and decrease the resources and time required. By implementing this rule, Houses that are actively involved in the research as opposed to houses that simply walk up to their computers and choose "Research this technology will get the technology significantly faster and at a smaller price.

This is why high-end technologies will have hundreds of stages, most of them only a couple of hours long. If that particular House continues to ensure that someone log in and check the status of the research, they'll succeed in developing that technology before anyone else, and gain full government funding as well as patent rights.