Ongoing tech tree changes
Ok, I'm going over the techtree right now. I'm not entirely sure where you guys are headed, but I will name things, which strike me as odd or potentially unintended
- all races have access to tourism
- synthetics have no popcap branch
- quantum and singularity powerplant in age of war
- expensive environmental engineering directly after planetology instead of the much cheaper colonial engineering. You could actually merge these two (planetology and colonial engineering) alltogether I think. One has to reach them sooner or later anyways.
- discreet ability: unbroken spirit and follow ups are fleet boosters but require invasion tech.
- same for time travelers dimensional branches
- the lines of splitting branches are really hard to read if they are on an age boundary
- atmospheric cleansing seems to lack the bonus allowing settlement on radioactive and toxic planets
- I can't seem to like the repair/carrier branch merge. These are two different things. repair is something you are going for if you are taking a lot of damage to your ships hulls, while carriers somewhat prevent the same thing.
- one of the governance specializations was formerly called drenginize for slaver races... it was nice fluff
- the Thalans have the tech names Amphibious Education, Cities of Learning etc.
- snathi are slavers instead of unrelenting?
More general thoughts on changing the techtrees:
I think I figured out what you were trying to do:
Since many buildings now need ressources, a player will now just research the stuff he has the ressources now. In this case there is needless complexity in the techtrees. I will have to think some more about this. I wouldn't mind if you could tell me whether I am totally off with this. But if the above holds, I see where you were coming from with the opt in 2.1.3 trees.
I think the presentation in the tech tree viwewer could be improved. look at age of war military for example. You could increase the distance between the invasion, the weapon and the defense branch.
Not sure how you feel about this, but wouldn't archeology be much more fitting as a sidebranch of the research branch?
One place where I could actually imagine improvements by slimming down the tech tree are weapons and defenses. I'm not sure I ever specialized in more than one weapon. I'm not exactly sure what it might look like in the end though.