Will the game present alternative ways of developing technologies (like steampunk or biopunk), or at least part of them?
Define them!
Steampunk, sure in the sense that steam is a great power source. It can even be used to power weapons, steam cannons were kinda usable in their heyday, even if no one ever went to the effort to use them in combat, and military airguns made good used of motors because pressurizing them is slow. Also, airships! They’re pretty awesome! Will the game present steam as a viable alternative to electricity and internal combustion engines and nuclear power? No, I assume not. Examples of why that could happen in any scientifically sensible way would be if a previous species evolves sapiance, used all the fossil fuels and uranium, but made such a huge global warming it made a second Cambrian edit: Carboniferous (lol I’m so dumb) so there’s coal. Extremely unlikely given that animals already would have evolved to eat bark and global warming doesn’t last that long, but maybe the previous creature used a super nuke or something.
Biopunk??? Ohh yeah that doesn’t sound likely. Biotech has been shot down before, and the idea of alternatives to regular tech, in especially the context of underwater, is basically a punching bag. Regular technology just makes more sense. There will almost certainly be a biotech underwater civ mod if/when we get that far. Just get that and hope it’s balanced and fun.
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I didn’t mean full steampunk or biopunk, I meant that will there be any alternatives in technology? For example, could there be temporary steampunk due to deep oil and uranium deposits? Or a bit of biopunk in the form of genetic engineering? And I didn’t mean only them, I meant all similar genres of alternative technologies.
I hope the tech three isn’t 100% linear, and I assume it won’t be, so ? Having trouble knowing what you want here
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I mean the possibility of developing non-linearly in terms of technology. For example, on one planet there is almost no oil, but a lot of coal, so steampunk technologies can be used here up to the invention of coal liquefaction.
Expecting it to be possible: yes, forced linearity is dumb.
Expecting it to be aesthetically pleasing: maybe not.
Expecting it to be forced on first time players: heck no.
Yeah aside from that i don’t really know. Leaving now, any better answers could come from a dev or just smarter person.
If I’m anyway up to speed on what the discussion is about, I don’t think it is in any way infeasible to have technology alternatives and multiple different paths through the eventual Thrive tech web. Though we need to consider our limited development resources. I foresee there being much more slight alternatives to technology rather than completely different ones, because then if those technologies set the world on a vastly different course we might need to make like 5 tech webs instead of just 1 and that’s over 5 times more effort as the increased scope of the game makes everything exponentially harder like testing all combinations of features and fixing unforeseen interactions of different systems with each other.
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