Isn't that "just race up the tree" though? By penalizing players who choose a broad range of low techs, you force players into the higher techs.



You mention that this will force factions to be more distinct. I suspect that players will across the board invest in the same set (the perceived "best") low-era techs, just to era-up. This will be especially true if the high-era techs are better versions of the low-era techs (i.e "Armor 1" vs "Armor 2"). There's no benefit in researching a little bit of everything which seems counter to the idea of "no prerequisites".



I agree that it's difficult to judge without playing...

The mechanic may not be terribly realistic, but it's pretty clearly aimed at avoiding the "just race up the tech tree" strategy. By forcing you to make more strategic choices about which techs to go after, necessarily don't pursue everything you'd like to have. As a result, you wind up with a faction with more character (a greater quantum of uniqueness, to the extent that there can be varying degrees of uniqueness) because your faction is partially distinguished by the tech choices you made. The scarcity of techs ought to encourage more trade (either for the techs themselves, if possible, or for the end products of those techs). I can't really judge it until I get to play it myself.



That said, it IS counter-intuitive. What I would really like to see is a less transparent process for developing tech, so that it's a bit more of a surprise. That would take a whole new level of innovation, though I fear introducing opacity to a system that has typically been fairly straightforwardly player-directed would likely put people off.