Dark Age of Technology Mechanic

[Ojodeaguila]

What do you think about an upkeep for the technology?

An empire will need to use some of his research to maintain his tech level, and if you lose your research worlds you could become stagnant or even to lose randomly some of your techs.

 

[InvisibleBison]

It's a potentially interesting idea. A lot would depend on the details of how it's implemented.

 

[Talanic]

Huh. That honestly doesn't seem bad to me, but it feels like it might not work for Stellaris itself.

 

[DukeLeto42]

I think the idea has merit, with some caveats. For one, note that "dark age" is a pretty antiquated term in general. The other challenge is that historical "dark ages" (again, not a term most historians use any more) see a lot less technological loss than is often believed. Instead, the breakdown of centralized power makes specific technologies or their applications justified - for example, early medieval Europe didn't stop building sewers because everyone just forgot how to do it; rather, with the largest cities measured only in the tens of thousands, it didn't exactly seem like an aspect of infrastructure with much value.

In practice, this means some techs are prone to disappear, while others just aren't. Your decline might lose you Battleships, as you become unable to support fleets of a magnitude where such ships have value, but you aren't going to forget how to build gamma lasers in favor of blue ones.

 

[Snorro Soliman]

What do you thing about an upkeep for the technology?

An empire will need to use some of his research to maintain his tech level, and if you lose your research worlds you could become stagnant or even to lose randomly some of your techs.

This is a cool plan. Not sure it should be an upkeep on tech though, paid in tech/research points.
Instead, perhaps certain factors such as ethics, dissatisfied pops, or a high number of religious pops, resource shortages, cataclysmic evebts(loss of your highest research producing planet for example) can trigger loss of tech or special projects that apply malus, disable random buildings ), ship mods, projects. Or impose increased maintenance costs on advanced tech, so you are incentivized to switch to lower tiers.
Or special projectw costing immemse amounts of research, before new research may be chosen(so no progress towards tier X until the project is completed).

 

[Talanic]

This is a cool plan. Not sure it should be an upkeep on tech though, paid in tech/research points.
Instead, perhaps certain factors such as ethics, dissatisfied pops, or a high number of religious pops, resource shortages, cataclysmic evebts(loss of your highest research producing planet for example) can trigger loss of tech or special projects that apply malus, disable random buildings ), ship mods, projects. Or impose increased maintenance costs on advanced tech, so you are incentivized to switch to lower tiers.
Or special projectw costing immemse amounts of research, before new research may be chosen(so no progress towards tier X until the project is completed).

This is a lot like my suggestion to make unity an upkeep instead of a bank. Unity deficit would result in pops breaking from your orders based on their ethics - militarists consuming resources and not working as they make survival bunkers, stuff like that.

 

[Snorro Soliman]

This is a lot like my suggestion to make unity an upkeep instead of a bank. Unity deficit would result in pops breaking from your orders based on their ethics - militarists consuming resources and not working as they make survival bunkers, stuff like that.

I wasn't aware, could you link your suggestion? It sounds cool and I'd like to read it too.
Could mesh well with the supposed upcoming internal politics/institutions

 

[Talanic]

I wasn't aware, could you link your suggestion? It sounds cool and I'd like to read it too.
Could mesh well with the supposed upcoming internal politics/institutions

No surprise, it got a little attention but not that much.

New Unity and Cohesion system

The core of this suggestion is simple: Unity is no longer a resource stored globally, but instead a supply like Amenities with production on an Empire-wide scale but no stockpile. You can choose to allocate unity in many directions. Adopting...

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