Allocating research budget for different megastructures

This is different to the thread that exists in the Future Game Space threads as I particularly mean megastructures built on the planet before you become spacefaring, but could also apply to making megastructures in Space stage. My idea is you allocate a certain budget to researching different types of megastructures such as ones for mining, crop propagation, energy production etc and the more you prioritize spending in research, the quicker said areas of research get funded

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I sorta have an issue with a lot of strategy games about this. When they make all the buildings use one resource I tend to think of megastructures (read: fancy things, thrive will likely outdo them in scale) weirdly, like in AOE where I spam wonders instantly, or Civ V where they’re a calculated risk because they can only be built once, which is silly. Hadrian’s unimpressive wall wasn’t impossible to make because the Qi’s slightly less unimpressive wall had be built (and in fact upgraded to the Ming’s rather impressive wall). On the other hand if they’re totally different, and you don’t construct normal buildings with the same precision or some such thing, they feel silly. They’re just buildings, it should be the same thing, just scaled up. I think a solution might just be good game design, but also I think having very unified resources might help. Like assigning all labor. It seems a bit less silly then I’d think, but might have issues with over complications from having to make sure you couldn’t assign all your peasents to research nuclear weapons, or that your well educated, well armed, hard to govern, frontiersmen, might take issue with your ordering them all to mine coal or lithium or gold, at least without a lot of nice excavators and cushy salaries. That is, of course, my issue with Victoria 3. I have no clue what’s going on.

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