Aspects and Sciences

In the previous post, we had a quick look at the neverborn previous tech tree and, perhaps more importantly, at the new type of "tech mille-feuilles" that Ad Lumens will make use of.
Now we are going to examine aspects and sciences in more detail and explore the relationships that tie them together along with factions.

Aspects

Reminder: aspects are the underlying truths/facets of the game Universe. In many ways, they define the way the Universe is articulated and how much granularity the game engine makes use of when considering "the world".

Ad Lumens makes use of 80 aspects in total at the moment. As written before, those aspects are defined along two axes:

• Form: whether the aspect is Physical of Abstract
• Origin: whether the aspect is Natural of Artifical

These two splits are useful to get an overall feel of how the aspects are spread. The following table shows the current repartition of aspects:

Changes are possible, but unlikely at this stage. With the evident exception when there will be an obvious missing aspect that covers so much "ground" that it would leave a gaping hole in the game engine's coverage of reality.

Some aspects used by the engine

I know I said aspects would remain hidden, but here are few of them, perhaps to illustrate the sort of concepts that are applied to aspects as a whole.

And that's about it for aspects; pretty simple and arbitrary, but trying to offer a coverage as comprehensive as possible of the rules & principles of the game Universe. The number of linked sciences is as of today… and will heavily change no later than a few hours from now. So those numbers are only temporary indicators at best.

Sciences

Sciences are what players will be directly interacting with: in a way, they are the visible manifestations of aspects. Through them, aspects peek and say "hello" - and players can answer back.

There are several distinct, albeit linked, ways to interact with sciences:

1. The first is by knowing of their existence. You can now access the "tech tree" section here: it offers complete visibility of sciences and will change often and probably profoundly. It will also be gradually enriched with new sciences (the list is far from complete) and new elements such as blueprints, governance systems and the like.
2. Once ingame, of course, one starts to interact officially with sciences - hence with limitations. The good thing is that even though you know a science exists in the engine, you don't quite know how to unlock it. This is one of my favourite aspects (haha) of the mille-feuilles: since the mechanics (thresholds, etc) are hidden, you can never be certain how to unlock a science; nor can you be absolutely certain how you did unlock it!
   Compare this to a traditional tech tree, and suddenly the whole science/research system becomes decidedly more immersive, more mysterious, less predictable - and more fun. At least to me…
3. Once unlocked, one will very likely research that science, thus generating research points that get turned on the fly into knowledge points.
4. A player/faction can research several sciences at the same time; in fact, I would say it is advised to do so.

Let's explore some more points with some level of detail.

A science: surface definition

Sciences are stored in a flat database table - that has not changed from the previous version of the tech tree. The fields are the following:

Really nothing fancy at all - none of the native fields are system- or mechanics-based.

Science tiers

Another "surface" data type or model is the science tier. Science tiers are only used indirectly by mechanics - they are an arbitrary split whose goal is to convey some sense of progression for sciences and to avoid sciences to be obviously "off" in terms of advancement. Even though this is of course subjective and based on how the virtual reality is and how factions are supposed to make scientific progress in it, we ideally want to avoid situations such as:

• the science Fire discovery ending up in the same tier as Writing
• or the science Jet propulsion ending up surrounded with renaissance-like sciences.

Again, this all depends on the setting (Steampunk and the like will surely have such "aberrations"), but Ad Lumens tries to belong to the hard science genre, so there you go.

With that being said, the current (as of this writing) list of science tiers is the following:

The tier names are… a little bit poor. But the naming can come later as it's all db-stored anyway.

We will leave the knowledge points column aside for now; only know that their values are freely modifiable, in order to manage the delta between tiers. I am as likely to multiply the values by 1,000 as to divide them by 42.

Aspect×Sciences

Now we come to the mechanics part. Somewhere in the database are stored relationships between Aspects and Sciences; this is more than a simple many-to-many relationship, as several extra fields define the nature of the relationships.

Aspects as science pre-requisites

Factions unlock sciences by accumulating enough knowledge points in the relevant aspects. This dependency is declared using minimum thresholds that must be reached by factions in their mastery of given aspects.

For example, if a science requires the following:

• Aspect A with 1,000 knowledge points
• Aspect B with 1,100 knowledge points
• Aspect C with 1,300 knowledge points

Then the faction will not see the science at all until it has accumulated at least the declared number of points in all the specified aspects.

Sciences as tools to improve knowledge

Once it unlocks a science, a faction can choose to allocate resources to its research. I am not still clear on how to do this in terms of low-level mechanics but the overall principle is that research points gained via research are poured into the linked aspects' knowledge points.

That conversion does not happen on a 1:1 ratio, however. Nor does it happen forever. The table below detail the rules around conversion for each science-aspect relationship:

A comprehensive example

The science above (tier 1.1) has been unlocked by Joe and he starts to allocate ingame resources to it; thus accumulating research points for that science (again, nothing prevents him from researching other sciences in parallel to this one!)

The science further defines its research relationships with aspects as follows (curves are hand-drawn but should visually convey what they are supposed to):

Aspect	Unlocking (kpts)	Research longevity (tier/tier difference)	Research longevity (rpts)	Diminishing return parameters (rpts->kpts)	Curve
Aspect A	1000	1.8/0.8	1800	1.0/2.5
Aspect B	1100	2.5/1.4	3500	1.0/1.9
Aspect C	1300	2.2/0.9	2600	1.0/1.5

Let us focus on aspect C, the aspect with the best return ratio when converting research points to knowledge points. Why the best? Because as X increases, Y decreases more slowly, i.e., you get more bang for your buck for longer.
However, researching aspect B will keep on generating knowledge points for slightly longer.

For any given amount of research point accumulated in a science, the engine converts that amount into knowledge points for each of the aspects linked to that science. That conversion uses the values above and if we decompose the knowledge points gained for each aspect, we get a result similar to the numbers found in the following table. Please note we stop at various research point checkpoints (between 0.0 and 1.0), but any other value would work. X is a normalised value, and is derived from the current accumulated research against the longevity of the aspect-science expressed in points.

¹: aspect A's maximum longevity is 1,800 research points. Anything above is simply ignored!

²: aspect C's maximum longevity is 2,600 research points. Anything above is simply ignored!

As can be seen, the return on investment varies heavily between aspects, depending on their longevity and the "ROI curve". Even though this all remains hidden in the engine, I have tried to garantee the possibility to move on to new/difference sciences in order to suffer less from very strong diminishing returns. This is a balance/gameplay issue I am aware of, and have built tools (not perfect but hey) to monitor any "gaps" in an aspect's opportunity for knowledge growth.

In closing

And that's it for this post. The next one will adopt a more "gaming opportunities" approach and be less technical. It will probably also touch on the subject of blueprints (so yes, some mechanics will be in there!).