@Morlark

There's never enough research, especially when you want to prolong the awesomeness of a game! There is however the number of different research branches, and techs within those branches, which might be overwhelming for the new player; especially when they realize that the more one branch is researched, the more time it takes no matter how important that tech is.

'Better, intuitive research' was a general call of attention to this problem whereas the two initial suggestions concerned the current mechanics.

Techs usually have different degrees of importance and take a specific amount of time to develop. The exponential/unified research system nullifies that game convention and pushes the player into choosing techs without clear guidelines. This issue would be mitigated if the game was only about empire-building or just about RPGing. But blending these two elements in gameplay makes for very dissimilar options in research. As it stands, this system is more complicated to understand, being not clear what a 'correct' approach would be. Research thus becomes a puzzling chore instead of adding to the fun factor.

My experience as a computer nerd is that non nerds loathe this sort of thing. Remember the Impulse Orb that most didn't quite understood? Similar conundrum IMO.

maybe not that there isnt enough or too many.

But more like it needs a new layout.

Things start off slow, which is fine. But once i stayed focused on schools and education, i was getting new technology every few turns, and i had no idea what they did.

I think a tech tree layout can help players organize pathways and keep things more organized, i was just random building since i didnt know what did what. Plus add some hints what they do. This builds marketplace. Well what does market place do?

For me, an in-game research tree cheats the civ building lie we are willingly telling ourselves. But I like the sim/world building part of games like this.  I shouldn't be able to know that atomic weapons are in the future somewhere and if I follow X path I get them.  It's more real to me to research "warfare" and see a progressive  evolution of weaponry.

In fact, I'd dig it if, while researching magic (or some such thing), something goes terribly wrong (as research does) and I hit a dead end and lose the points I spent or I get the tech but the inventor dies in a related explosion.

Good times indeed!

Sword of the Stars had an implementation for this if you were "hurrying" technology.  Not such a problem if you were researching something relatively benign like lasers.  A huge problem if you were researching, oh, AI.

Edit: WRT Technology Trees

I think that as long as we have a tree with lots of prerequisites, we should show the tree.  So if we don't want to show a tree because it breaks immersion, then I think we need to move away from prerequisites which force a tree structure on the technology field...

zubaz i was expecting a comment about how its cheating or not exploring if you know the end result of your path. That is true.

Tell you straight up i just HATE how the setup is for the technology. Really felt like i was just building random stuff hoping for random results. I think a tech tree will have cleaner more precise results. You can have the tech tree either

A) Only display the next results but hide the rest. This game can branch off in many directions, and typical gamers will know what comes next but have a hard time deciding since they will be presented with many opportunities. (which is good)

Balance things out so if you know the end results, ending result A is not obviously a better choice than result B.

C) or just change the layout of how you select skills (ie tree format), and add some information other than "Lumber skill build lumber yard". What does lumber do and by how much?

I agree the current implementation of the tech system needs something of an overhaul to make it easier to use and enhance the game experience.  It is a strategy game after all, so you want to be in control of where you are going and know what each tech does. Some randomness can spice it up but the basic must be that you can make intelligent choices and decide to go for a certain expensive tech further on in the tree. 

Also, it seems not balanced that researching e.g. beehives in mid game would be extremely expensive. Why? If you have now a developed civ it should be able to solve such basic techs rather quickly. Otherwise you will just feel obliged to always research the techs in the order they show up. It's like punishing the player for trying out unique strategys ...

A lot of cool techs though, and there can never be enough. Keep up the good work!  

I never understand why a civilization could only research one thing at a time. Be neat if you could have primary and secondary research focuses where primary is your main focus while the secondary research discovery takes longer but at least research is going to that area. Its kind of an archaic system to think that a civ can only research one at a time without thinking about other techs.

Also as it is right now the tech descriptions are very sparse. I would like to see what units or buildings these techs unlock without having to open a civpedia tool. 

Personally, I like the current system, research wise.  My biggest complaint is that I can't always tell what a unit does / what it's prereqs are before I choose it.  I'm still using houses... but I've researched villas, estates, and mansions!  How do I upgrade?!  (Probably a city size thing, of course )

Also, there are a variety of buildings that don't seem to make sense.  Abbeys (and archives), at 4 squares, give me 1 research?  Is there an additional bonus I'm missing that they're supposed to give?

I agree and I expect that this sort of thing will be fleshed out quite a bit as the beta's mature.  A lot of the available techs are simply placeholders at this point.

One thing I would like to see is some way to get more information on a given tech, from the research window, before choosing it.  Something like the Civilization Civilopedia where you can drill down through successive layers.  For example:  the entry on Housing tells, in addition to what the Housing tech brings, that it may lead to Villas and Estates with links to the 'pedia entry for both of those.

There definitely ought to be more information available. Showing the entire tech tree might not be necessary, but at the very least you should be able to get detailed descriptions of the buildings/items/abilities that a tech unlocks when you pick a breakthrough. You can’t really make informed decisions right now.

Let’s say for instance that the “Higher Education” breakthrough shows up for you as an option. The description tells you that it allows you to build Universities (and something else, I forget). So, what is a university in Elemental, exactly? It probably helps with research, but does it generate points like a Study, or does it enhance the existing production like an Elder Council? Is it an upgrade to something, or will you need some free tiles to make use of it? You won’t find out until you’ve committed to it. Nor will the game tell you that it requires a city of a certain level, which means that this breakthrough might be useless to you, should you not have such a city.

For that matter, I think it’s a problem in general that if you don’t have a high enough level city and you unlock an improvement that requires it, you won’t be able to find out why you can’t use your new improvement. It just won’t show up.

Many have proposed a tech tree but I don't want to know what's coming far in the future.  Part of the fun is discovering all the techs, having them all laid out takes away from that.  I would rather just have the research description tell me what it opens in the immediate future (i.e. iron daggers has a section that says "Leads to iron shortswords").

Also like some others have mentioned I would like to lessen the dependancies to a degree.  Maybe instead of iron daggers being required for iron shortswords it should just give a bonus to finding that tech and you can't find a tech 2 above it in the tree (iron longswords or whatever).  You already have the idea of an iron dagger in your head, it is possible to leap ahead a little and discover shortswords instead.  Shortswords would be rare but possible.

you can have both: a generic tech tree (different for every faction) and whenever you research a tech there is chance you will discover a unique hidden tech instead (give the player the choice to choose between the two though)

ya there is a middle ground for the tech tree. People assume that a tech tree will show EVERYTHING and ruin the experience.

but with the system going on right now i dont like it. I dont know whats what or what direction im heading.

Like asking if you are invading a town do you go left or right?...... well whats to my left and whats to my right? I dont know the outcome, but at least give me some general info.

The scrollbar needs to be made larger or more obvious or something as well when choosing tech. I'm on 1920x1200 and it took me hours until I found out sometimes I can choose between up to 9 different thingies.