# Talk:Gameplay Proposals/Scientist Cap Per Research Project

"While this is partially fixable by having otherwise useless techs be required as prerequisites for more important things, there is still no avoiding the fact that it's simply more efficient to dump all scientists into a single project and do them one at a time..."

There's something fun about having multiple projects going on at once and not knowing what you'll finish, and unless we give an incentive we'll lose that."

Why is it more efficient? I don't think it really is, unless you count the fact that you get your first tech sooner. If you find it fun to have multiple techs researched at once, all that is needed for you to have that fun is the lack of a dis-incentive. Which IMHO is the way it is. An incentive is not needed to get the player to do something that is actually fun. And if he doesn't find it fun, he should be free to research one thing at a time... unless there is some balance issue that escapes me. --Eleazar 06:57, 18 February 2008 (CET)

This sounds like a very good idea for balancing as well as feel of realism. I would put the start of the diminishing returns forumla for >3 sientists / project and have it slowly increase so that further manpower above 10-12 somewhere is almost useless. --Stedevil 06:15, 18 May 2008 (CEST)

Diminishing returns is not always realistic. There are many efficient ways to organise research in order to minimise loss of efficiency. As long as members of research groups are given enough room to function and coordinate, research can run quite smoothly even with large numbers of people. I would agree however that scientists with only one or two subjects or objects to work with won't be able to benefit as much from larger numbers of people. For example: If you only have one specimen available for autopsy, throwing fifty scientists in the operating room would be counter-productive. If you have ten specimen and room for ten concurrent autopsies, that's another story. My point: If research limitation is meant to be added for realism's sake, it ought to be added in a realistic fashion, and not based on arbitrary thresholds. --Alien Menace Saturday 19 July 2008 (GMT-4)

"While this is partially fixable by having otherwise useless techs be required as prerequisites for more important things ..."

We could also give the player advantages from these "useless" techs about alien behavior etc, by improving the Base Facilities/Training Simulator. In description of the facility it warns that we don't fully understand the behavior of the aliens and that training would improve if we understood the aliens better. In the research result reports you could add a paragraph along the lines of: "The results have been uploaded to the combat simulator." to indicate the improvement, the rate of XP increase through simulator use would increase (not to a broken level, but perhaps the starting rate could be reduced and the improvement would asymotically approach the broken level).

"It's simply more efficient to dump all scientists into a single project and do them one at a time..."

Yes it is. If I research A and B at the same time, it takes twice the time as doing just one of them (2T). If I research them one at a time then it takes the same amount of time total, BUT I will get one of them halfway through.

If we want multiple research projects to make sense then we need some incentive to dividing the scientists: a greater overall rate of research at the expense of not having anything soon (something less than 2T but greater than T).

So the best throughput (bandwidth) would be to do everything possible all at the same time, but can earth survive that long without any research results?

This kinda makes sense, different scientists have different interests and specialties and so would work better if they have a choice about what thing to research.

By the way, how much choice a scientist has is proportional to: log( N ), assuming there are N equal choices. Not sure if that is usefull. --Droid 19:29, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

How about adding Specialists/Team leaders for hire? They each would have a preferred avenue/topic for research. When assigned to a project in their speciality, they would give a little boni. They also have only so much skills in people management, so they have preferred team sizes. With expierence their management skills rise and they can work well with bigger teams. That would make the player keep them and develop them even if he doesn't have a project in their speciality at the moment.

This also keeps the choice between concentration on a single project or multiple projects. Does the player bring up one team leader to manage a big team fast by having him research everything or multiple team leaders on a slower pace, but taking advantage of their specialities. I think that would encourage and not force the player to have a few projects simultaneuosly and not feel as arbitary. --Zinder 22:36 27 February 2009 (GMT+1)

All adding a cap to research would do is limit how players choose to play the game. To me it is wrong to FORCE everyone to play the game identical to the way you do. A lot of people would find such a limitation annoying,and in my case probably cause me not to even play the game (research would be so slow that IMO it would break the game). Take for example I'm getting an onslaught of alien attacks, and need some new armor to be researched quickly as my troops keep getting severely injured/dying. As is, I can pump a bunch of scientists together and research it in a month or 2(maybe 3). Now if you cap scientists(especially as low as 9 or 10) I'll be forced to research needed armor so slowly that I'd probably be eliminated from the game by the time research is done. If you find it more fun to have multiple research going at once, it's as simple as doing so. Players are in no way hindered to having multiple research,and if they choose to do so,they can as it currently stands. You need the ability to quickly research by pumping in lots of scientists,in case of emergency. While it may be "fun" to be forced to research both advanced weapons and advanced armor at the same time, it would be more advantageous (and possibly life saving) to get one of the 2 faster than both at the same time,however delayed. You're also forgetting that if you've only got one thing available to research,you'd have tons of wasted researchers sitting doing nothing. Overall I think that forcing a cap limit is just a bad idea and could cause more of an annoyance than would do good(which I can't see it doing any good). WEll,that's my 2 cents, back to lurking with me :-) --tizubythefizo 03:03 28 February 2009 (GMT-5)

One idea I had was that every scientist had some stats for four or five fields - such as Biology, Mechanical Physics, Energy Physics, Chemistry, Electronics - similar to how soldiers have stats. However, the sum of all stats of a scientist should equal 100, and statistically scientists will tend not to have zero in any stat. Every research topic belongs to a single field, and only the points that a scientist has in that field are applied. (An alternative is that only half of scientist points not belonging in the field are applied). This allows efficiency when researching multiple topics because every scientist will tend to have a specialty, but expediency when researching a single topic because every scientist will contribute to the research in a linear manner. Psawhn 17:40, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

I think that the point is that there needs to be some reward for diversifying research to counter the obvious reward of getting one of the technologies faster. If you made it so that, after you reached a realistic limit on how many scientists could concurrently research a given subject without redundant efforts and organization issues (and there are such limits in real life), adding further scientists resulted in some decrease in their efficiency, then dumping all your scientists into a single project at a time would still give you any given technology faster but would (realistically) slow down your overall research rate.

Making the management of scientists all complicated probably will not add much to gameplay, but establishing a fairly simple and realistic tension between dumping everyone onto the most 'urgent' projects and letting smaller teams work more independently would be good. I have to admit, it makes hardly any sense to me that scientists currently have full profiles like soldiers, unless the idea is that they will be present during base defense missions. It might even be worth doing to take away player management of the number of scientists assigned to any given project, you'd just have to keep authorizing research until all your scientists were busy.--ChunLing 04:12, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

In my opinion, research is not a deterministic activity. Right now it's really easy to tell exactly when a given piece of research will be done. I think this and the focused research issue could be solved with a simple and elegant system. I think there should be a chance for a brilliant insight to leap a research effort forward by some significant amount, say 10%.
This chance should go up the closer you are to finishing. It should never be huge, but should likely happen for a player for about a third of the projects researched.
This can be accomplished with this formula: $f\left(x\right)=e^{\left(2*\log{2}-\log{3}\right)*x}$
Then $f\left(current_research_points/total_research_points\right)-f\left(previous_research_points/total_research_points\right)$ will give you the chance that a breakthrough occurred during a given time interval.

--Omnifarious 18:24, 23 June 2009 (UTC)