[MattII]

New poster here (lorq13 pointed me onto this place), and I have to say that some of there ideas are rather interesting, particularly the stuff about technology. Now I have a few ideas of my own regarding technology:
Specialisation
In most games, the price-per-level of a technology increases as the level does, but this runs contrary to how life actually works, so what I'd like to see is that various technologies start off expensive, but get cheaper with each level, maybe a 20% price drop for easy 10% for medium, and no drop for hard.
Uncertainty
Now I can't say I like tech-levels overmuch, but they are convenient. Now the issue here is that in most games levels have set costs, which I also don't like, so I'd like to propose that we ditch fixed levels and come up with a sort of chance thing, where you can see the resources you need to give for a 50% chance of getting the next level, but you can invest as little or as much as you want, with the chances being:
- less than the 50% price - 0.5*3)(x^2) [half the 3rd root of the square of the value]
- more than the 50% price - 1-0.5*3)((1/x)^2) [1 less half the 3rd root of the inverse-square of the value]
This gives a ~19.8% chance for an input of 1/4 the 50% value, a ~31.4% chance for an input of half the 50% value, a ~68.5% chance for an input of twice the 50% value, and an ~80.2% chance for an input of 4 times the 50% value.
There'd also have to be a per-unrequited-turn method of shortening the odds, but I'm not sure how to go about that yet.