Research speed should be tied to backstory, not scenario.

[Call me Arty]

 I have a bunch of pawns who were too busy picking berries to not starve to death and fighting off wolves to dedicate time to screwing around with the science behind making colored lights or making televisions.
Understandable that they don't research too quick-like.

They club a Glitterworld scientist in the side of the head and recruit him, and provide him with the same research facilities that you could expect from an industrial colony.
He has a severely gimped research speed.
What.

I understand that the current method is far easier to code than scrolling through dozens and dozens of backstories and tagging each one, but still. It's ridiculous.

[Klomster]

How i'd do it, is to add a hidden trigger with some of the backgrounds.

For example glitterworld scientists, then give those a large bonus on research speed.
60%-120%? Something big, don't recall directly how much tribal penalises research but it shouldn't outdo the penalty.
Perhaps remove 60% of the penalty. (Equivalent.)

That way, you are penalized in research for being tribal, makes sense, but getting a person who should know this is extra worthwhile since a big chunk of the penalty is dealt with.
Since tribal tools are a bit eh, the research shouldn't be trivialised.

But i recall an idea i had which is much better.

One should be able to research a higher tech level.
So tribals can become colony, spacer etc.
It could either be a set of prerequisites which automatically make your colony a higher tech level, or a separate tab of research which is a simple ladder of improvement.
Or both, every step of the ladder has a large set of prereqs.

That way, one can fix the research penalty with hard work.
Of course these researches should be rather hefty, but i'd like the option.
Cost should probably be like, it's worth it if you go for a broad research pattern, but if you spearhead it is just as easy to just go for the specific thing.

A random suggestion, 10'000rp for tribal > colony.
Or something along those lines.
Perhaps for each colony level research you have, the tech level research could be cheaper, but that's probably a massive hassle.

[Gabe Lincoln]

For example glitterworld scientists, then give those a large bonus on research speed.
60%-120%? Something big, don't recall directly how much tribal penalises research but it shouldn't outdo the penalty.
Perhaps remove 60% of the penalty. (Equivalent.)

The penalty for being a Tribal is double cost on Medieval techs, Triple on Industrial, and Quadruple on Spacer.

Research as a whole system is rather boring. The only real bits of dynamism in it is you have to get a Hi-Tech Bench and you need a multi-analyzer. The pawn sits down and stares at a desk until it's all researched. There's no cost other than a pawn being tied up in this forever. There's also no way of balancing the cost of techs other than just making them take longer. These both make research rather undynamic and also somewhat nonsensical. It kinda makes sense that researching advanced stuff would take a while due to a lack of infrastructure to help with research, but there's no cost otherwise to simulate the resources put into experimenting and prototyping and such.

If researching had a resource cost, it'd be a really neat decision. Something like do I use the 300 wood it costs to research beds now, or do I put off Researching beds to use the wood for useful things? Or with bigger research like let's say blowback operation, it would need let's say a Heavy SMG and an Autopistol. If there's a research time and a resource cost, it allows a much more dynamic and scalable tech experience with some interesting choices, like "Do you give up the guns now, or go without the tech and arm your colonists?" It would also give an opportunity to add other choices like I have the prerequisites, but if I give it say another SMG, it'll reduce the research time by let's say 25%. Those are meaningful and interesting choices in my opinion. The current system is very much lacking in those. Yeah, build order is a meaningful choice, but it's not an interesting one. OP's solution while interesting isn't going to fix that problem.

I'm playing a Tribal game, and it's kinda silly how big even Vanilla tech costs get for them, with minimal methods to change it. I consider gun turrets a staple tech in this game, and it's about 15k Research points to get in the prebuilt tribal start. This is a long time, but getting there isn't particularly interesting. I'm not making a decision about that, I'm not trying to save resources in any way, it's just gonna take a really long time to get there with no real method for me to reduce the time taken aside from getting the stuff I need for it without building where possible.

TL;DR: The problem with Research as a whole is that it's kinda a fire and forget system, and it isn't actually that fun to interact with. You have your research bench, and your researcher, and that's basically it, and OP's solution isn't going to fix the problem that research is basically a job is static and not particularly full of fun and interesting decisions.

[Tober6fire]

@Gabe Lincoln what you are suggesting is essentials to become the raiders. when you start off (if you are using one of the default scenarios)  normally  u will contain if you were playing crashed survivors you would have maybe the basic gear of a bolt-rifle revolver and a palsteel knife if you were to go farther down the line in reasurch such as blowback you will have to rely on raids to have the right guns in order to reasurch the Tec to get more of those guns or to get turrets (which in your terms of item usage will cost a lot more then it is worth). Your system relies on other factions to be a lot more advance then you for you to advance up and you might never get to spacetec. In a play through

[Gabe Lincoln]

@Gabe Lincoln what you are suggesting is essentials to become the raiders. when you start off (if you are using one of the default scenarios)  normally  u will contain if you were playing crashed survivors you would have maybe the basic gear of a bolt-rifle revolver and a palsteel knife if you were to go farther down the line in reasurch such as blowback you will have to rely on raids to have the right guns in order to reasurch the Tec to get more of those guns or to get turrets (which in your terms of item usage will cost a lot more then it is worth). Your system relies on other factions to be a lot more advance then you for you to advance up and you might never get to spacetec. In a play through

But you have to do that right now, especially as Tribals, because research is so slow you'll be waiting forever to get the techs anyway. You can also you know, trade for stuff. Caravans come pretty regularly, and you'll have a lot of guns if you get raided regularly. Besides, it was just a suggestion. Is it going to be perfect immediately? No, but I feel like it is a better system than the current one. As I said in my current post, the current one isn't very interesting, and doesn't really interact with any other system aside from unlocking things. This would allow it to interact with other systems significantly more.

[BlackSmokeDMax]

For example glitterworld scientists, then give those a large bonus on research speed.
60%-120%? Something big, don't recall directly how much tribal penalises research but it shouldn't outdo the penalty.
Perhaps remove 60% of the penalty. (Equivalent.)

The penalty for being a Tribal is double cost on Medieval techs, Triple on Industrial, and Quadruple on Spacer.

Research as a whole system is rather boring. The only real bits of dynamism in it is you have to get a Hi-Tech Bench and you need a multi-analyzer. The pawn sits down and stares at a desk until it's all researched. There's no cost other than a pawn being tied up in this forever. There's also no way of balancing the cost of techs other than just making them take longer. These both make research rather undynamic and also somewhat nonsensical. It kinda makes sense that researching advanced stuff would take a while due to a lack of infrastructure to help with research, but there's no cost otherwise to simulate the resources put into experimenting and prototyping and such.

If researching had a resource cost, it'd be a really neat decision. Something like do I use the 300 wood it costs to research beds now, or do I put off Researching beds to use the wood for useful things? Or with bigger research like let's say blowback operation, it would need let's say a Heavy SMG and an Autopistol. If there's a research time and a resource cost, it allows a much more dynamic and scalable tech experience with some interesting choices, like "Do you give up the guns now, or go without the tech and arm your colonists?" It would also give an opportunity to add other choices like I have the prerequisites, but if I give it say another SMG, it'll reduce the research time by let's say 25%. Those are meaningful and interesting choices in my opinion. The current system is very much lacking in those. Yeah, build order is a meaningful choice, but it's not an interesting one. OP's solution while interesting isn't going to fix that problem.

I'm playing a Tribal game, and it's kinda silly how big even Vanilla tech costs get for them, with minimal methods to change it. I consider gun turrets a staple tech in this game, and it's about 15k Research points to get in the prebuilt tribal start. This is a long time, but getting there isn't particularly interesting. I'm not making a decision about that, I'm not trying to save resources in any way, it's just gonna take a really long time to get there with no real method for me to reduce the time taken aside from getting the stuff I need for it without building where possible.

TL;DR: The problem with Research as a whole is that it's kinda a fire and forget system, and it isn't actually that fun to interact with. You have your research bench, and your researcher, and that's basically it, and OP's solution isn't going to fix the problem that research is basically a job is static and not particularly full of fun and interesting decisions.

I'd very much like to see some material requirements for research. There was a mod, Rimworld Ascension, that did something very cool like that. Sadly, it hasn't been updated since A13, hoping once 1.0 hits, it will be a project that gets picked back up. IIRC, for a few examples, you had to collect some dead animals to research butchering. You had to collect some stone chunks to research stonecutting. They would put the items on the research bench and study them until the research was ready to go. Think there was more stuff like that, but it has been a while, so I forget what they may have been. Plus, I'm not sure the mod development had progressed very far past the early stages of the game, but I think the plan was a continuance of that system.

Don't think if I'd like to see the tribal slowdown removed, it was put there primarily to slow down the research, and there are mods to change that if you like. Whether that is via straight changing research speed, or changing research level by advancing through periods, there seems to be something to cover that aspect.

[tmo97]

I think the whole research system has to be reworked.

1. It shouldn't be a "stand at box to research over time" thing because linear progression like that using a standard rate is going to be troublesome due to there being only 1 factor that also happens to be non-influencable, and made even less effective by the fact that you can't train research either.

2. The tree should be split into various branches considering the order atm makes no sense aside from the contrast in imagining the techy thingies. lol

3. Currently most of the research involves either meaningless aesthetic or thing that you need to research for 50,000 hours unless you wanna die in this environment where you need that 1 thing.

[Klomster]

This reminds me of a system in Victoria 2.

Where one could get 'breakthroughs', in that game it unlocked buffs based on other techs.
For example, i research 'steam engines', one of the breakthroughs could be 'Fifer 1800 steam engine' or something like that, which gave a bonus.

What i was thinking was not to use that.
Since some small details were very annoying, like 'gas masks' was a breakthrough.
Like, yeah, i think i want to reverse engineer these things that keep the enemy troops alive, WHEN I KEEP USING GAS!
Small gripe aside.

The breakthrough would be random, higher chance higher skill of course, it would in the current system add a bunch of research points.
Or perhaps even just straight up give you a research, or perhaps a research of your choice worth X.

One could even use this as the standard research method.
However, people would go nuts over RNG.
One could possibly have the researcher "crafting" research theories/prototypes, basically your classic 400page clip board thing.
Then one used that to get research points, higher quality book thingy, more RP.

Obviously the thingy is used up in the process.

I still think that tech level should be upgradeable.

Tmo97.
Technically you train research by doing it, i think logic (trained with chess) also affects it, but not certain.
But i agree, research is bit boring.

Or more lackluster, i think it just needs something more.
I'd say my breakthrough idea would do a lot. Just a Rng boost thing, apart from inspiration which is also a nice mechanic.

"John has gotten a clever idea, halving the research time for the current project." Or something.

[kraftwerkd]

The tech tree after using Research Tree and GHXX Tech Advancing is a dream come true - if something similar could be used in vanilla I think it would be so much better on the whole than what we have now.

[Klomster]

So how is it with using those mods kraftwerkd?

[AileTheAlien]

Tech Advancing allows your colony to move upwards in tech levels, if you research all of the previous tech, or half of the tech in the next level. e.g. If you research half of all the "medieval" tech as a neolithic tribe, or finish all the "neolithic" tech, you move up to th the "medieval" tech level. Research Tree appears to just be a mod for making cleaner / easier-to-read tech trees, and for queueing up tech to research. Neither of them however, address the linearity / boringness of research.

Given that there's already a mod for "research blueprints", which give you X% towards a tech, I think there's enough tools in the game (or that mod) already, to change research into something more interesting. It would be relatively straightforward (although take some time) to make different recipes, which would give different ways to advance your tech. For example, to research stone-cutting, you could have one recipe that takes four stone chunks, and gives you a technology blueprint (or directly adds the tech, if that's possible) for stone-cutting. A second recipe could be 250 stone blocks, which means your pawns would have to break down some of the the ruins in the map, to research stone-cutting. As another example, Blowback Operation could have one recipe that takes one pistol and one SMG, and gives you a 30% boost to the tech. A second recipe could be a "traditional" style of research, where it takes no resources (or only common things like steel), but takes a long time to give a +10% boost to the research.

Besides the interesting-ness of research, I agree with the original post, that research penalties should be tied to back-stories, not an abstract "tech level" of your entire colony. That being said, with my previous example of how to change research, it would only apply to the slow / no-resource recipes for research. :)