How exactly does varied technologies work?

[vvwulfen]

Hello all.

How exactly does varied technologies work?
Does playing without it ticked give a country new tech based on historical dates etc?
While playing with it ticked give tech that was not available to said country before a specific date?
Cheers

[nimrod]

Pretty sure it doesn't massively affect introduction dates - that would be SeaWolf's mod; nws-online.proboards.com/thread/4913/mod-release-un-random-tech.

The answers are somewhat complicated as you are asking about something that is intentionally varied. I'm going to refer a little to rtw2.fandom.com/wiki/Technology and www.navalwarfare.net/files/SAI/RTW2_GAME_MANUAL05b.pdf.

1. Some members have charted the affect of varied technologies in the .bcs file; like techquirk 4 being worse shell penetration - nws-online.proboards.com/thread/877/varied-tech?page=3 from RTW1. I've not charted the affects so I'm going to have to quote the manual: "There is an option for varied technologies. Varied technologies were introduced as a way to recreate historical uncertainty about which way technology development is moving. We as players have full hindsight and we know what naval developments were ultimately the most successful. Ship designers and admirals in the early 20th century had no idea. Is a big gun battleship really a good idea or not? Are torpedoes really the threat they are made out to be? Nobody knew! That is the situation that varied technologies is intended to recreate. The effects of playing with varied technologies are varied and will change from game to game. Technologies might arrive later or be harder to invent. Some technologies may be easier to invent. Some technologies may not live up to their promises. Long range gunnery could suck, multiple gun mounts turn out to be a bad idea, torpedoes are not as good as expected etc. So remember that when playing with varied technologies you are really in a parallel universe where things did not turn out the way they did in our regular naval history."


2. Kind of - Does playing without it ticked give a country new tech based on historical dates etc?

The way it works is that a lot of technologies have less than 100% research chance with a fixed research cost. The randomized research chance means that no country is going to research all the techs in a game; and every game will have different tech advancement sequences. The "yes" to your question is that historical research dates are kept; but keep in mind that as you skip around in your research, you might research tech #11 and then research tech #9 which has an earlier research date. This is due to some technologies having a proliferation chance, so you might not research triple turrets but once you see another country field them your chance of researching them increases. In my current Italy Game, I just discovered K-Guns in 1940 and they have an introduction date of 1924 and 100% research chance.

3. It can move the research dates forward or back and even impact the research cost - While playing with it ticked give tech that was not available to said country before a specific date?