Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-72.185.125.155-20130602235037/@comment-9042171-20130603060949

there is no penalty only think is you can get less tech and design points for 2D graphics game V3 and above than 3D graphics game V3.

It is because each graphics has hidden propearty called tech level (see Raw Data for Review Algorithm). 2D V3 has tech level = 2 and 3D V3 has tech level = 3. but bigger difference is for higher Version of graphics: 2D V5 has tech level = 3 and 3D V7 has tech level = 7.

Also tech level of the game is not just tech level of graphics but it is average of tech levels of all graphics in custom engine and tech level of used platform (see Tech and Design Points Generation Algorithm) So you can increase tech level of game with good platform too.

Tech and design points are directly proportional to tech level so it doesnt increase lineary (for more info about that you can look at my page about Tech and Design Points Generation Algorithm, there you can also find my helper spreadsheet that calculates amount of tech and design poinst together with review score.

Second thing that is important to tech level is technical expertise that is used during review score calculation but it is needed only for Large and AAA games and this is quite important too because for Large games you need at least tech level = 3 to get max review score (if you have only 2 review score will be only 9/10 of max review score and so on)

and for AAA games you need even more: tech level = 5 to get max review score. More about technical expertise you can find at Review Algorithm page.

If you closely look at tech level tables you will see that it is impossible to get max review score with best 2D graphiscs and AAA game (2D V5 tech level = 3 and Playsystem 4 tech level is 6 => average = 4,5) so you will get only 95/100 of max review score.