This thread is about brainstorming ideas for other ways to blance existing and new tech mods. The core of this thread is about the idea behind and the mechanics for a resreach based system to gate your tech levels and pace the game instead of using complex nested recipes or neither stars all the time.
These qouted posts are from another thread and we will not speak of its orgins.
I think that is most of them.
These qouted posts are from another thread and we will not speak of its orgins.
[relating to a few of the posts on the previous page about different ways to do tech trees and researching in technology based mods, a bit like Thaumcraft]
BuildCraft's system of fabricating items by inserting materials, selecting a target item, and providing energy, could be a good model of fabricating machinery. However I'd reverse the order to select an item, see the materials required, insert the materials, and provide energy to build it. This would allow it to start out with costly recipes which produce lower quality versions of machines, and over time players can improve this to require less materials to create a particular item, or produce better versions of it with the same materials (or improve both).
Improvements might be automatic after producing several copies of an item, or doing research could ever give specific benefits or give the player points to spend improving machines of their choice. (Or upgrading the quality of machines could be left to inserting upgrades into slots, or by another machine which applies bonuses similarly to the way enchantments work, though more directed.) Unlocking new recipes in the tech tree could be a process of trial and error, or could require researching particular items or machines similar to how Thaumcraft works, or might require villager trading, dungeon items, completing achievements (or similar), or creating particular configurations of machines as multiblock structures.
Actually perhaps a better way of looking at it is the RedPower project table, but if most things required the project table, and you couldn't arbitrarily create your own blueprints but had to discover or unlock them through various means. Except without needing to have a thousand separate blueprint items, rather you'd have them collected into blueprints for particular mods or parts of mods or areas of interest. And the recipes would be shapeless, might have more than 9 items, and can be made cheaper with research...
The Carpenter, Thermionic Fabricator, and Rolling Machine are other crafting blocks that could work in a similar way. (Oh, and the cart assembler of course.) Xycraft has its fabricator (eventually) and Factorization has its craftpacket maker and stamper, but like RedPower, neither of those are requirements for creating tech. So most mods have some kind of tech fabricator, though many of them are just fancy crafting tables which are optional, or else they are only needed for a subset of the mod's items. (AFAIK IC2 doesn't have anything like this, rather it relies on varies machines to create some of the parts that can be crafted)
So maybe if there was something in Forge that provided hooks for performing/unlocking research, which mods could optionally (depending on config) use to control what can be crafted and how, then there could be some universal tech tree research thing going on. But it would be a lot of work and would require individual modders to add stuff which might only be used for a small subset of players, so it would never happen. And the alternative would be for one mod to override even more stuff than GT does, and would be highly invasive and would easily lag behind changes to the mods and would be a nightmare to balance at all... so that would never happen either.
But it's nice to imagine for a few minutes. I think the only way anything like this could work would be to create an entirely new game from scratch
TL;DR
possibly cool ideas which would never be practical
I think that is most of them.
