HotM:Research

Intro

First off, I should note that at no point does the game sit you down and say "this is how research works." It doesn't really need to, as it comes up contextually whenever it's relevant. However, I'm trying to explain this in a clear and broad way, so I'm going to do so in an organized fashion.

Initial Key Terms

• Unlocks are a term for basically... new stuff. Whatever it is. Some piece of equipment, a new type of android, a new mech, several new androids, a new structure type, new job to go in a structure, new abilities for units, new resources that can be used, and a couple of other things.

• Upgrades are a term for improving... something. These have no direct relation to unlocks. They are whatever they say they are.
  • So it might be an increase in the building cap for a certain class of jobs, which includes some jobs that you don't even have unlocked yet, for example.
  • It might be a firepower upgrade to "all shotguns," and you only have one at the moment, but there are 5 you could have later that would also be benefitting from this.
  • Or it might be to a specific stat of some specific class of unit. Or building. Or job, or equipment. Or it might be something really super duper hyper specific. The system is incredibly flexible.

• Research Domains are a way of getting more unlocks and upgrades, but not at all the only way.
  • A research domain is an arbitrary thing, and there are as many of them as I feel like there being.
  • One particular unlock or upgrade might be in multiple domains; unlocks are only unlocked once per timeline, but upgrades are typically done multiple times, sometimes many times, in a single timeline.
  • Think of a research domain as being kind of like a big grab bag of possibilities. But you can't get that bag without first having inspiration.

• Projects are things that you do. They're objectives large or small.
  • Minor ones have only one possible outcome and auto-complete when you meet the criteria.
  • Main projects have multiple possible outcomes, and end when you choose for them to.

• Missions are a thing that NPC groups do, from time to time.
  • They might be friend or foe or something in between. Typically foe-or-neutral.
  • A mission has two possible outcomes: the NPC group succeeds in whatever they are up to; or they run out of time and give up.
    • If they run out of time, and they were a foe to you, then this is considered you thwarting that mission.

Background About Timekeeping

So let's take an aside and talk about timekeeping. This is a turn-based game, like Civilization (Civ) or similar. However, you are not in a footrace with someone else, unlike Civ, and unlike most RTS games.

This is more of a hot and cold sort of situation. The original Rainbow Six is a game that has come up a lot in comparison to that. When dispatched on a mission in R6, you first get blueprints, and outfit yourself, then deploy around the target location, and remain hidden until you choose to strike. During that period of R6, you have all the time in the world. (Still talking about R6) Then once you decide to move, or get spotted, suddenly everything happens very fast and you must be on the ball. Whatever your plan was, hope it survives contact with reality.

HotM is a lot like this, and frankly I would also sometimes describe AI War 1 and 2 as being a lot like this. Bottom line is, as with AI War, there's often nothing to stop you from just kind of sitting around and "refleeting" (as in AI War), and coming out net-positive by being overly prepared.

So for this reason, this means that a lot of things can't just happen by turns alone, or else the player can literally just burn through like 40 turns and collect all the stuff.

Civ, for example, has infinite-producing science generators, and more-than-linear growth in the cost of their researches. So if you keep on producing more science generators, and keep ending turns, then eventually you generate an even-more-than-linear growth in production, and get all the techs.

This would be fundamentally incompatible with HotM. This doesn't just apply to research, but to a lot of things.

Okay, so back on the subject of research. You can't just have more work done every turn, at least not in a grand sense. So where is the timekeeping for stuff like that?

Answer: Projects and missions, but primarily projects. Things that don't well in being measured by turns are instead measured by how many projects you have completed.

If you're familiar with AI War, this is very similar to how a number of things are essentially measured there by "how many planets you've taken." Nowhere in either game does it outright show that as a measure, but when discussing balance, this is the primary metric for a lot of things.