Blitzer wrote:

Not a fan of the pick one or the other approach you've taken with the new tech tree. It really ruins the shipbuilding gameplay for me. I hope you change it back. Personally I  think it's an improvement.

First there's real choices now.  You still get all your hulls, but you do need to choose which you'll upgrade (although it does mean they'll need to try to balance them so there's actually a reason to pick one over the other).  Likewise weapons being tied to resources and exclusion choices seems good for the game, as it stops the RPS "refit everything" games, although it is kinda weird that you can basically ignore combat for awhile, get to era 2+ weaponry, and then be forced to research the lower tier stuff.

Still its a massive improvement over "oh they're using missle boats, refit to kinetics and armor until they refit to lasers and armor at which point i'll refit to..." and so on.

Second putting the hulls with the left side of the tech tree was smart.  In ES 1 they were on the bottom with the colony optins, but I think they fit better for gameflow reasons here.  Having them be in their own little section of the era system was meh, especially since it was so easy to grab them it felt required.

Still I do think that hyperium and titanium need to be WAY harder to find.  I've been playing all my maps on lowest resources and its still so so easy to find.  I'd like to see someone actually using the market to get the material to get the tech they need to counter their opponent rather than just "meh".