Project Description: Tech Landscape

This was originally Lifewish's idea, but I'm currently the most active (read 'only') dev over on Launchpad. The basic idea is that, instead of a tech 'tree', which constrains development to 'sensible' paths, technological advancement is modeled with a 'landscape'. The current plan is that each tech is a single point on a landscape (currently 2-dimensional), and a player's knowledge is represented by a closed surface (currently arcs of a circle, though there's no sound reason for this beyond having something coded). If the surface contains a point, then that point's tech is available to the player.

This is all complicated by the fact that most points exert a repulsive influence (currently not modeled, though it does follow inverse-square) on 'knowledge'. Some techs, when obtained, will modify the repulsion of other techs. This allows 'synergy' between apparently-unrelated techs.

Ideally, techs will be randomly-generated and hidden from the players. (Including AI. I think I sublimated my brief ant-burning phase into tormenting things that actually give me a reason to hate them, like cheating AI.)