>>>>> Research Tasks ~ Researchers Look Here <<<<<

[Augustus Lucifer]

THIS THREAD IS NOT UP TO DATE. IT WILL BE UPDATED IN THE NEAR FUTURE. THIS NOTICE WAS RE-POSTED ON JUNE 8TH; IF YOU SEE IT AND A WEEK OR MORE HAS PASSED SINCE THEN, PLEASE CONTACT ME AND REMIND ME.

The point of this thread is twofold.

1) I'll be listing a few areas where we need research at any given time expressly. I'll try to list a variety of areas so there's some differentiation. If you find that the OP seems out of date, please PM me and ask me to update it or verify that it's still in force.

2) Researchers should ask here about where they should be diverting attention. If for some reason you have no capacity to be useful in any of the stated areas, then it's on you to air this and suggest areas you might be of more help in so I can give you a task pertaining to that area.

Some notes about this thread:

- If we ever have a Lead Researcher who shows a lot of knowledge and initiative then they will be tasked with handling this thread and come to me and Alex for advice.

- Anyone, artist or coder, who needs help researching something they're working on should ask in this thread and any local moderator can add it to the list as Regular Priority.

- Any team or section leader can escalate a task to High Priority or downgrade a task to Regular Priority.

- Once again, if this thread looks like it needs updating or you aren't comfortable with any of the stated areas, please show initiative and PM me and I'll see to rectifying it assuming I'm not on leave at the time. I'm extremely busy and on this site alone have a lot of things to tend to, so I can't be everywhere all the time.

Research Tasks

High Priority

Unit Rosters

Who's Working On It? KR153, tokimitsu
Completion Percentage: ~10%
Location(s) for Research: Here & Here

Description: At the time of this writing we have roughly 40 completed units and a few unit artists who need tasks. As researchers it's not your job to assign the tasks, but we need people to start filling out the unit roster as prescribed in the first thread, so that they can be approved and then assigned.

Involves: This task involves primarily military research and art gathering. It doesn't help to know for instance of a generic unit name like 'swordsmen' without it being in the framework of a faction's military institution, explaining what role the swordsmen played in that faction's military. Furthermore, it doesn't help to know the name of a unit but not have any leads to go on in terms of concept art. So this task is all about proposing units for a roster with reasonable historic backing and concept art to help aid the modeling and skinning process. Without reasonable basis we could wind up creating an ahistorical unit, and without concept art we have nothing to go on.

Concept art is not always necessary, if you happen to have primary or secondary sources handy which describe the unit in detail in text, that's good too. As an example, see this RTR preview where in the Units section they make considerable reference to the writings of Polybius and Livy concerning their unit design. If we have sources like that it's probably even better than concept art, though I imagine things of this nature will be few and far between. As an example of the kind of stuff we want to know, see here or look at any of the posts by RollingWave/celstialwarrior/Xuande concerning the Song Roster(1), except now it should be done on the wiki on individual unit pages.

In addition to new information, we also need help consolidating information we already have, primarily concerning Goryeo and Dai Viet which have had considerable roster comments in their faction discussion thread here or on the public forum. It's hard to develop things when it's so spread out, so reading through those threads and interpreting it onto the new roster format is also helpful, but make sure to write unit pages as the names in a roster aren't of much use alone.

Make sure to utilize the 'Unit Pages' and the wiki in general, if you have any questions on the Wiki ask them in this thread, and if you need a wiki account please PM me.

Religion

Who's Working On It? Shadowcry, Marcion
Completion Percentage: ~10%
Location(s) for Research: Here

Description: We've developed a framework for our religions to operate in, and now it's a matter of figuring out all of the contours of our religions and giving them character. We need to know which religion each faction would start with as their state religion, as well as what percentages of each religion in terms of practitioners would be present in each of our regions. Furthermore, we need to know how religions felt about one another so we can decide the extent of religious persecution and unrest in a multi-religious and pan-religious environment.

Other things like tendencies of religious fanaticism, appreciable effects of converting from one religion to another(may vary by religion), the types of additional benefits and penalties religious infrastructures would give aside from the normal or obvious, and various additional things mentioned in the thread linked to above, are also helpful in fleshing out the religion system.

Involves: This task involves a dialogue in the thread above to help fill in and differentiate the religious framework that has been laid out. The potential for variation, from religion to religion and from faction to faction, is very versatile and quite a few things can be simulated. Ideally all religions will have their quirks above and beyond one extra bonus here or there. It also involves taking some liberties with religious categorization due to the limits of the engine, in terms of particular religious sub-divisions which can't be accurately represented.

The thread above explains a lot of the facets of the religious system in detail and the third/fourth posts go into some of the things which need figuring out from a research perspective. Suggestions for changes and improvements from a historical or gameplay perspective are always welcome and encouraged. It is also important that the descriptions of the various religious buildings be written so that people who are here to write text descriptions have something to go on in expanding it with rhetoric. Finally it's important to gather artistic representations of how these can be shown in-game, so that 2D Artists can make images for them.

Regular Priority

Economy

Who's Working On It? RollingWave
Completion Percentage: 0%
Location(s) for Research: Here

Description: The economy of the game pretty much underlies all other aspects of it, as you need money to finance cultural and military buildings and units. In the basic game the economy is painfully simple: farms, market, roads, sea trade, couple faction-specific things, merchants guild. That's about it. How this compares to a real economy is way out in left field, but that's the nature of a game system. What we need however is to make an economic system for Asia which not only represents all of the aspects that we can conceivably portray, but also adds a degree of depth to economic decision making for a player so it's not as simple as "click farm+market if need moar moneyz".

Involves: This involves doing the research to determine the economic landscape of our time period. Rather than go in-depth about that here, I've made a few lists of things which contribute to the economics package in the OP of the location thread above. The Climates task on this list also plays into the economics system, but is considered for research separately.

Diplomatic Relations

Who's Working On It? Shadowcry, Marcion
Completion Percentage: 0%
Location(s) for Research: Here

Description: Determine the political landscape of the mod by analyzing each factions military and trade relations with each of the other nations, as well as internal strife.

Involves: Some of the tenets of this are described in the thread above. Fortunately if there's one thing that history is not shy about, it's politics, so there should be no end to the information available about the diplomatic relations in our time period. It might be harder to say what the Tanguts may have felt about Pagan, as they likely never came into contact, but for neighbors it should be well documented and just needs to be applied to a game environment.

Climates

Who's Working On It? None Reported.
Completion Percentage: 0%
Location(s) for Research: Here

Description: The map is divided into a series of climates which allows for regional diversity, both in terms of the look of fields, foliage, and mountains, as well as in economic terms. The map needs to be split into 12 climates maximum which encapsulates the landscape of East Asia and insures we don't have wacky things like palm trees in the steppe.

Involves: This involves research into the seasons and weather patterns of different areas on our map, as well as the gathering of imagery. It is feasible that the landscape and climate has changed in the past thousand years, but we don't have the liberty to meet the probably one person on the planet who knows in-depth what it may have looked like in our time period. As such we must take some liberties in extrapolating the information we have about the climates of today, with any information we can glean from sources in and around our time period. The end goal should be a template for regional diversity in the distribution of ground types and economic considerations. This is explained some more in the thread linked to above.

Strat Wonders

Who's Working On It?
Dai Viet Faction:
-Vietanh797

Goryeo Faction:
-Tokimitsu

Completion Percentage: ~15%
Location(s) for Research: Here

Description: TBD

Involves: TBD

Researchers

Lead: None at current

This section lists all team members whose primary focus on the team is research or who also contribute in a research capacity nominally. If you're taking on a task, let it be known in this thread so you can be added to the task. There is no limit to the amount of researchers which can work on one task, the more the merrier as it creates checks and balances to subjectivity.

Researchers (working on tasks)

KR153
Marcion
RollingWave
Shadowcry
tokimitsu
vietanh797

Researchers (should contribute to tasks)

Asean
Nakandakari Lobato
Sultan Nedim

Researchers (inactive)

celestialwarrior
STELLover
TheLastPrivate
Xuande

[Augustus Lucifer]

This thread has been finished now so all the above areas are filled in to date. If I missed anyone or any area of research let me know.

Keep in mind that everyone does not need to have only one task. If you feel you can contribute to multiple areas of research, great, please do.

[Eisberg]

I've been today in the Asia and Africa Institutes Library, and borrowed a lot of books about Mongols, Tunguts and Kitans ...
So I would gladly do some researching on Kara khitans and Mongols...

[Yelü Dashi]

Hi, those aren't areas that are priorities (see the list above for the ones that), unless you are researching one of those factions these under those headings i.e. how should religion work for the Mongols, or information on economy of the Khitans.

I have pretty much read everything about the Khitans in English, so I would interested to know which books you have.

We are really desperate for someone to develop the rosters for SE Asian factions, Khmers, Burma, Champa etc - this would be really useful.

[Augustus Lucifer]

The OP isn't entirely up to date at the moment, as the notice suggests. I'll go through and update it some time next week probably or this weekend, depending on a few matters. That said, pretty much every area currently listed up there still could do with research into it, even if some may not be priority right this moment.

Religion and Economy are still priority. ('Religion in AUH' thread in coding/scripting and 'Economics Package' thread in coding/scripting are the places to discuss those as a function of the system rather than a function of a specific faction. Make sure to read through the threads.)

Obviously rosters are also a priority but that's a whole different beast.

[Marcion]

Religion and Economy are still priority. ('Religion in AUH' thread in coding/scripting and 'Economics Package' thread in coding/scripting are the places to discuss those as a function of the system rather than a function of a specific faction. Make sure to read through the threads.)

Well, you know, people have tossed ideas around in those thread, but no one's ever "weighed in" on them, hint hint. Just some kind of guidance on how things might go would be helpful.

[Augustus Lucifer]

Yeah, I'll try and get to that as soon as possible. I've been very busy with Uni stuff last few weeks as Yelu knows, which continues til about Monday actually. My classes don't let up for the summer either, but I'll try and start into my to-do list on Monday.

[Marcion]

Yeah, I'll try and get to that as soon as possible. I've been very busy with Uni stuff last few weeks as Yelu knows, which continues til about Monday actually. My classes don't let up for the summer either, but I'll try and start into my to-do list on Monday.

Under circumstances like that, you may want to consider actually delegating authority for some things. If you don't have time to steer the mod in every way you claim you will, people will just get lost and nothing will get done in the time you're absent...

[Eisberg]

Oookay, I 've been in the library again and took some books about Khmer empire and Pagans too
so basicly now->

how should religion work for the Mongols, or information on economy of the Khitans.

have eanough information on both, just need some brainstorming ...

I have pretty much read everything about the Khitans in English, so I would interested to know which books you have.

I've posted it in BC3 forum if you havent seen it yet so here it is. ( Books about Mongols and Chiese have also often useful information on Kitays and Tanguts)

1) Imperial Nomads, Luc Kwanten, leicester University Press.1979 ( in English)
2) History of civilizations of Central Asia, Volume IV, the age of Achivement. A.D. 750 tp the End of the 15 century. Unesco Publishings.1999 (English)
3) Chinas Imperial past. Charles O. Hucker ( English)
4)Tungusen und Lijao. Karl H. Menges. Wiesbaden. 1968 (German)
5) Die Mongolen I+II,Walter Heissig.Insbruck.1989 (German)

We are really desperate for someone to develop the rosters for SE Asian factions, Khmers, Burma, Champa etc - this would be really useful.

Okay I have now exactly what we need !

on Pagan:
1) a Book called "Buddhism in Myanmar" is telling a lot about how Theravada Buddhism comes to Pagan Kingdom etc....
2)"Pagan, Stadt und Staat" ( Language German, means " Pagan, City and State) tells everything we need to know about it:

• Administration and Tax system
• Militarysystem
• Culture
• Traders and distant Trade
• Temples and relogion

O Khmer:
1) "Short History of Cambodia" as the tite says is a historical overview, without many precise deteils, but (still is better than some damn Wiki Article...)
2) "The Khmers of Cambodia" here we have it more deteiled, at least one whole chapter that tells about "King Jayavarman VII, Hero of Heroes" a ruller of the Empire who reigned c.1181-1215...
3)"The Ancient Khmer Empire" this oe is the most deteiled, with accents on Architecture, Religion and Conquests ( Khmers conquered Champa), but still not so deteiled like "Pagan, Stadt und Staat", there is thank to the good verview you find what you eed in notime, here need to read probably whole book and mark everything you need yourself..

Suggestion:
I still not quiet understood why you guys want researchers, search in some directions like economics, and then jump from Khmerian economic system to Mongolian etc. that is a headache ( at least for me personaly), isnt it much easier to do a full research on one Faction, and then start with another one ?

[Marcion]

I think most people doing this research just aren't experienced enough in game design to really be coming up with complete systems on their own. I guess some kind of primer as to what things you should be thinking about when making a mod would be good, since really "research" is a fairly small part of what goes into this.

I'm not sure what to think about the confidence you have in me, but if that's how it is, I'll give it a shot. I'll try to get some of the research threads into shape this weekend.

[Augustus Lucifer]

None of us can truly say we're experienced with game design, this is a pet project in which we're sort of stabbing our way through it as we go along, trying to lay out enough based on the vanilla model and what other mods have shown, as well as some ingenuity derived from historical reality, that the end result can be eventually fashioned into a polished product.

For the benefit of those who don't think in design terms, I'll list a few things to consider:

1) Type of implementation involved
2) Modeling a complex reality through modularity
3) Relating something in terms of another something
4) Scope creep

Type of implementation involved

There are two things to mainly consider when thinking of the type of implementation: scope and method. Scope is how far the idea extends. Method is what game aspects it is most suited for.

Scope

Four types of scope: individual, faction-specific, meta-faction, and global.

An individual scope means that the idea is not part of a bigger picture and only extends to itself. Implementing it means writing one chunk of code that is entirely self-contained. Some examples include:

• An ancillary to represent a specific famous person.
  
  • There's only one of each famous person. There aren't two Zhu Xi characters walking around. So to implement a Zhu Xi it means writing one ancillary and the means the ancillary is acquired. However, this could jump to a global system if it was underlied by commonalities in an overarching 'Famous Persons' system. An individual scope usually implies some manner of uniqueness that isn't worth qualifying as part of a bigger picture.
• Some units that have an element of uniqueness, such as Sohei Monks, and aren't part of an overarching recruitment system.
  
  • Again, this could be part of some 'Monastery Recruitment System', but for our purposes we'll assume it's just one unit recruited from one area under a few circumstances with no further implications.

A faction-specific scope, which may also be a region-specific scope, is something that is distinctive about a certain faction or certain region that should be represented to give them or it a flavor all its own. This may in turn tie into global or meta-faction systems, but is in essence its own consideration. Some examples include:

• Song Dynasty: War/Peace Parties
  
  • This is a system which is unique to the Song Dynasty. It represents and tries to model the hectic situation in the academic and court communities which could sway the sentiment of the population and guide policy decisions. In other respects it's an attempt to model the weakness of the Song starting situation as a matter of disposition, in order to counterbalance their clear economic superiority as well as military and cultural competency.
• Pretty much every recruitment system
  
  • The goal with the recruitment systems is to try and make them as specialized as they were in actuality. This ties into building trees and availability. For example, the Song Imperial Army should probably only be available in certain regions and suffer large upkeep costs to represent the fact that it was kept near strongholds to defend the court and governments. The Japanese system should attempt to model the transitive relationship between a soldier and his lord, as well as possibly the implications on land ownership.

A meta-faction scope is something that applies to some or most, but not necessarily all factions. The only example of such a thing at the moment that comes to mind is the things which can only be changed from culture to culture, thereby necessitating groupings into cultures. Systems involving a specific religion will also fall into this category most probably, whereas religion in general is a global consideration.

A global scope is an overarching or underlying system that deals with the nature of what things have in common and then differentiates those things. Most, if not all core systems, are global in scope. These things consist firstly of a framework, secondly of a filling, and thirdly of an extensible exterior. They should be able to interact with one another. Some examples include:

• Administrative Policy System
  
  • The current administrative policy system assumes that, with some liberty, inclinations towards growth can be divided between Cultural, Economic, and Military lines. What this means for each faction differs, but the basic concept that a faction for a set period under some circumstance of policy direction will tend towards a bias in development towards one of the three is universal, or global.
• Economic/Religion Systems
  
  • While each faction economy is different, and each religion is different, the underlying qualities can be classified into a coded set that can then be built upon. For example, each region can be said to have a certain availability of arable land, a function to determine the amount of commerce present(considering things like accessibility, oppression, taxes, culture/religion, etc), one of a few types of modes of exchange(barter, currency, credit, etc), so on and so forth. Taking these basic concepts we model the underlying concepts and then expound them to differentiate from faction to faction, region to region, religion to religion, etc.

Method

The scope defines the extent of something and the method points to the means of implementing it. Some methods include: ancillaries, traits, buildings, units, missions, faction standings, AI, script, and external. Basically the game is built up from a bunch of different interacting pieces. There's many more than what I've listed, but those are the main ones.

If you say you want a way to track bloodlines, well that makes a lot more sense as a trait or an ancillary than anything else, possibly with a script contingent. Why? Because bloodlines have to be attached to agents(generals, spies, what have you), so they need to be implemented in a method that does that, or multiple such methods.

If something needs to have an impact on a settlement, the very first consideration is a building, since traits only very minutely impact a settlement and only when attached to a governor. In a more abstract sense that something may not be an individual building itself, but rather a capability of an existing building which is toggled on under some circumstance, therefore probably interacting with a script.

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So when you think up an idea or consider research/ideas provided by another, first consider if it has commonalities or not. Try to determine its scope. Then see whether or not it would fit in well with something we already have as a component, rather than being its own standalone consideration. Finally, think about the elements that make up the game such as those listed above, consider the things the idea would need to impact, and then structure the theoretical implementation on the basis of those methods. Not all theoretical ideas are plausible, since there are many code limitations that would take forever to go over, some that I'm not yet aware of I'm sure. Moreover, some that I could implement in theory might take 1 million lines of shoddy workaround code for a very marginal impact by comparison, and these fall under infeasible. That doesn't mean ideas shouldn't be suggested if preliminary considerations show possibility, if not necessarily plausibility or feasibility.

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Modeling a complex reality through modularity

Modularity is a fundamental programming concept, as with most other sciences. The taxonomy of species is a good example which groups vastly different things by their commonalities so that the end result is things can be defined in relation to a common starting point, and that starting point can branch out without redundancy to encompass endless diversity. When trying to visualize real world problems as system models, this is an important thing to think about. You always want to ask yourself if it's possible to break it down into contributing factors, and then chop out those factors and relate them to other things. Paper money =/= coins, and dollars =/= yen, but all of them are currency. Anything we can conceive can be simplified in this fashion.

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Relating something in terms of another something

This is in some ways a mathematical exercise. The number 75 expressed in terms of 2 can be denoted as 75/2. For us it's not math though, it's relating fundamental concepts. This is most important when we consider buildings, since there is a hard maximum number of building trees, and it's relatively small in the scheme of things(there's also a hard maximum of buildings within each tree). In an ideal world each faction would have its own buildings specifically for recruitment, its own buildings specifically for economy, religion, and so on. We can't do that though, so we have to understand how something like Mahayana Buddhism can be expressed in terms of Theravada Buddhism, or more precisely how they both can be expressed in terms of Religion. Then from this basis of religion we contrive diversity using what means are available to us. The exact limitations of buildings are an in-depth matter which I can touch on another time, but that's just one example. The Unit Phenotypes initiative is the same, an attempt to express the menagerie of units in terms of their basic soldier type and what animations they use, so that placeholders can be inserted which enable us to build systems around that without needing to have those units actually produced yet.

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Scope Creep

There's a reason I've not been coming up with new and interesting global systems, and it's called scope creep. What we have now encompasses a lot of end user choice and campaign diversity, and does a respectable job once fleshed out at modeling a complex reality. Some parts can still be improved and others replaced, but we have to be careful not to overreach. This is at the end of the day a non-profit project, by volunteers with limited time, with limited resources on a limited engine.

Our design decisions need to reflect this, so we can't think something up as being a cool idea and just decide to include it. Only about 10% of the work goes into the initial brainstorming and outline of any given system. The other 90% is maintaining it, balancing it, and making it work smoothly with everything else, then debugging it when all of that still inevitably fails. This is why I keep harping on the economy/religion systems and the unit rosters, because even if we implemented absolutely nothing else, with those things we'd have a playable game. On the other hand lacking solid systems in those areas but having something like a supply system would not result in a good end product.

We have to pick and choose. I tend towards systems which are wide-ranging and therefore extensible, and can work with what we already have. There will be plenty of sub-mods I'm sure which can add things like military supply systems or this or that, what we want is the foundation upon which users can have an enjoyable experience. Then once we have that we can worry about increasing the uniqueness of each faction, keeping in mind that all of these things need to be maintained by someone and I definitely don't expect I'll be working actively on the mod in 10 years time, or 5, or less if life circumstances dictate. We definitely don't want the first thing a successor does to be reduce the complexity of our systems to manageable levels or ignore them and let them go into disrepair.

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Hopefully that helps shed some light on the logic behind the decision making. It's not rocket science but it does take a specific mode of reasoning. We need to straddle the line between practicality and idealism, and when in doubt tend towards practicality.