Initial "Tech tree" released

I am happy to say it can now be browsed, and that it's been a long time coming!

In spite of this, it is far from finished and suffers from yet many problems:

• Much of the content still needs to be written, weighed, undone and probably re-done again. But that is nothing unexpected and content creation is not my specialty so… plus English is not my native language. I have an excuse! 8-}
• Trickier is the part where some sciences still do not have the perfect location in terms of tier and/or aspect dependencies. I still need to do quite some work on that and avoid the "Jet propulsion in the middle ages" syndrome

But it's there in very initial form and I'm happy. However, a few quick notes/caveats are in order.

Lack of "Human sciences"

It will be obvious that the science library is lacking in terms of "human sciences". This is normal as I have started doing some work on them - and they differ slightly from other, harder sciences because of their (envisioned) impact upon a faction's gameplay: governance systems, rules and macro/micro impact on populations, but also diplomacy, spying and so on.
I will try to gradually expose all of this later, but first I must feel happy about the system behind it, which is not totally the case at the time of writing this.

Science names

Some science names are obviously wrong (there may even be some placeholders left here and there). I am working on this aspect as well, but this raises an interesting family of problems/questions which can be described as follows:

• One must not name a science after the toys it unlocks; by toys is meant in-game capabilities, whether equipment or other. When such a problem occurs for a science, it probably means the science needs to become a blueprint.
• Even though it may feel interesting after being named, a science's scope should always be appraised: what kind of concept does it cover in the imaginary world? What aspects does it cover in the game mechanics? Does it overlap with other sciences? etc. If its scope is too narrow, then a science should probably be an applied science (although not always!). If it still feels too narrow, then it starts making sense to turn it into a blueprint or family of blueprints.

Aspect "gaps"

A new sub section is available in the Tools & experiments: the poetically named Aspects gap spotter. As mentioned in the page's sidebar, its heatmap is 100% based on live database data and is - and will - change very very often. A few remarks:

• aspects names/identities remain hidden;
• each aspect's data is displayed over two rows: one for unlock tiers (floored) and one for longevity tier (floored as well);
• the number of aspect × science relationships is naturally more concentrated in the low- to mid tiers. This is expected as the higher tiers will tend to specialise towards the peculiar vision I have of a far sci-fi future - but that of course can flex!
• some aspects are clearly lacking in the number of relationships they do enjoy: this is normal as many sciences still need to be inserted in the database, and their aspect dependencies/relationships created

Blueprints

Those are still missing as I am working on their mechanics. Add to this the fact that some sciences can become blueprints or vice-versa and that much-needed addition is not nearly there yet!