Grand Endeavours - Heliomance/Uncharted-Horizons GitHub Wiki

_{Design document §1.5}

Once a breakthrough is Revealed and all its prerequisites are Discovered, the civilisation may commit to it as a Grand Endeavour — a directed programme that needs no idea: visible, accumulating progress, like constructing a wonder: the fusion programme is 60% complete.

• Under study or not. (v3.121; v3.120 had allowed only ideas that had not occurred.) The usual target is a Revealed idea that has not occurred: a goal known to be possible that no one has yet had the insight for. An idea already under study can be Endeavoured too, to have it now rather than when its focus gets round to it: bomb shelters, the turn word comes that a rival has the bomb. When nothing presses, that only reorders research at twice the price: allowed to, the simulated novice and average player lose 5–6 turns of victory and the expert gains nothing (measured 15 October), so the simulated players never do it; its worth lies in the needs a game creates. It pays most for an idea trailing in a crowded focus. The Endeavour starts from nothing, as for any target, and the idea stays under study meanwhile; if study finishes it first, the Endeavour ends. Open: whether the Insight already spent studying the idea counts towards the Endeavour, and what becomes of the Endeavour's own Insight if study finishes first. The FTL prototype is an Endeavour of its own kind (Section 4).
• One Endeavour at a time. It occupies the civilisation's research focus entirely — the Endeavour is your focus while active.
• Cost premium. 2× the breakthrough's price at the moment of commitment (v3.112), filled from the active focus's share each turn: insurance, not a shortcut. RARE and UNIQUE Endeavours (formerly 4×, with the UNIQUE penalty as a further multiplier) are to be revisited; neither tier is ever glimpsed, so both are rarely Endeavour targets. Certainty is expensive; that is the trade.
• Guaranteed completion. An Endeavour cannot fail. If the target is an alternative in a Competing Solutions group, its lock-out is suspended while the Endeavour runs — committed pursuit keeps the road less travelled open. (Only such alternatives can ever be locked out, so every other breakthrough a world permits remains reachable indefinitely, as §1.2 promises.)
• Spin-offs. At 25%, 50%, and 75% progress, a small chance to reveal or discover an unrelated qualifying breakthrough — the Apollo programme effect. Big directed projects shed side-inventions.
• Abandonment. Progress decays slowly rather than vanishing; a resumed Endeavour picks up most of its prior work.

The gamble-or-engineer decision is the same one real research funders face: wait for serendipity, or pay a premium for certainty. Endeavours must never become the default path to everything — the guards are the one-slot limit, the cost premium, the Revealed-only requirement, and the fact that RARE/UNIQUE breakthroughs almost never reveal through theory. Serendipity remains the only road to the surprises; engineering is reserved for the visible mountains. In the late game, where real civilisations do not stumble into fusion but organise toward it, Endeavours prevent the cross-focus prerequisite chains from becoming a probabilistic grind — and the final FTL launch is the greatest Endeavour of all (Section 4).