Reply: Gaia Project:: General:: Re: Why putting advanced techs on tech tracks?

by Thunkd

carbon_dragon wrote:

It’s always easiest to learn a game if someone is teaching it to you.

That is far from true. There are any number of people who are just bad at teaching games. I’d rather learn from a rulebook than try to learn from them. And if a game is extremely complicated, it’s often easier to understand from a manual than trying to understand someone else explaining the same concept.

carbon_dragon wrote:

when you put something on a track in a game, typically something is meant to happen when you get there or go past that point in the track. Here it merely means the player has the option to take the tile, IF he does something like fielding an Academy, which is just a little counterintuitive (to me at least).

Actually it also indicates that you must be at or above the level of the tile to take it (the fourth or fifth level). The placement here is important for that reason.

And building an academy or research lab always means you have the ability to take a tech tile. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the way to get an advanced tech tile is based on the same mechanism.

It’s easy to teach... you explain the normal way to get a tech tile and then add on an addendum about being able to take an advanced tech tile if you are on the fourth or fifth level of the appropriate track and flip a federation tile. “...which is why the advanced tech tile is between the fourth and fifth space on that track, and has an icon on it showing flipping a federation tile.” Easy peasy.


The hardest bit for me is to explain that the research advance you get isn’t tied to that track. But I just throw in a “...it makes sense because you might be claiming it from the fifth level and a research bump on that track wouldn’t be worth anything, or you might not have another federation tile to flip to get to the fifth level and again it wouldn’t be worth anything if it were tied to that track. Because it so often wouldn’t be worth anything if tied to that track, they made it so that the research advance can be on any track.”