[Mod request] Culture and techlevels overhaul

[wwWraith]

I know there are mods for changing techlevel like Tech Advancing. But I think in RimWorld techlevel have some different meaning than e.g. ages in Civilization. I'll try to explain it.

I think about techlevel here as a sum of common knowledge and cultural traditions familiar for the given society. Tribals have more difficulties researching advanced techs not because their brains are smaller (after all, their ancestors most probably came from the other worlds by travelling through space) but because "industrial" colonists already have some familiarity with at least basic concepts of these techs: from their initial education and/or common experience, things they see or hear about every day. E.g. if we take 2 researchers with equal stats (equal "brainpower") but first raised in tribal society and second - in industrial and order them to research electricity, second will be able to remember some things like that there are electrons, conduits and isolators, voltage/amperage, ac/dc, magnetic and thermal/light effects, while first will have to invent these concepts from scratch (even to realize at first that he need these concepts), often wasting his time with wrong hypotheses.

So I'm suggesting to add "culture level" as a stat for every pawn. Then, researching speed should be calculated from this stat of the particular researcher, not the colony's techlevel.

1. Defining the culture level of the pawn.
Backstories have tags (<spawnCategories>) that may be used to detect which types of society the pawn could be from. Rainbeau's Editable Backstories may help with examples. I think that the best way is just to choose one from all the tags that pawn's backstories have. E.g. if their childhood was tribal and adulthood was suitable for industrial/spacer societies, we can't reliably say which of these cultures that pawn was accustomed to at the last, so let the random choose it. Or we can use only tags from pawn's adulthood is their age allows to think that they have spent enough time in that society.

2. Researching.
Change the amount of research points producing by individual pawn according to the difference between their culture level and research project's techlevel rather than increasing researching cost if its techlevel is higher than that of the colony. E.g. researching Electricity will require 1200 research points but tribal researcher will produce these points twice slower than industrial or spacer.

3. The colony's techlevel.
I think that colonists' culturelevel should adapt to colony's techlevel with a time passing, albeit slowly (probably several years per level). There could be different ways to make the colony's techlevel change, too. Probably it'd be better to make as in said Tech Advancing mod, based on the percent of researched techs from that and higher techlevels. While the idea to make the colony techlevel also being able to degrade (e.g. after some particularly devastating raid bringing the industrial colony back into stone age) looks tempting, I don't think it would be really worth to implement because most probably the colony will be restored (or abandoned) sooner than their researchers will change their culture levels. The other way could be to calculate the colony's techlevel as an average of all the culture levels of colony's pawns.

The main goal of this mod will be to make the researching process more diversified and realistic. It will generate situations like one pawn being the quickest researcher of low-level techs while other could beat them on higher techlevels. It will encourage the player to keep several pawns as appointed researchers and give more meaning to their backstories. The chosen method of changing the colony's techlevel will matter for strategic decisions. Also the cultural differences between pawns may be used for some social situations like it was in Rumours & Deception.

[crusader2010]

Very nice idea! I believe another restriction should be added too: do not allow higher research eras until all of the lower techs have been done. For example, electricity should be the first tech from industrial era - a prereq for everything industrial (or maybe steam power which should be more expensive and less efficient, then electricity). But this should appear in the research tree only after all "medieval" techs have been done. It really doesn't make sense otherwise. This is something scalable too, because mods that add research projects will appear properly (unlike now when you can research spacer projects from tribal era if there are no prereqs).

I remember there was a mod that did this somehow, but don't know the name. Hopelly someone will pick this cultural idea up as it sounds really nice!

[wwWraith]

I'm afraid this restriction has a little to do with my concept. I don't think it'd be logical to force the player to research e.g. Pemmican and Devilstrand before Electricity. The current prerequisites system looks fine for me.