I thought ES1's tech tree was visually a mess but mechanically fine. I never really liked or felt 'comfortable' with the Endless Legend style of tech tree however as I always seemed unsure of what to research next and felt the eras opened up too quickly, and was often left feeling like there was no point in researching earlier techs.

I never really liked the tech tree system of EL and preferred the ES1 version.

It doesn't really feel connected and is visually/mechanically a mess compared to the hero skill tree for example which looks like the ES1 tech tree but with a tiered system.

THe biggest problem for me is not even a problem about missing connections of the different techs but mostly the presentation with boxes etc.

I strongly agree with a lot of the opinions here and hope that this might be changed later on because I really like the EA version so far.

I agree that for many techs, there should be a required tech that can be from a previous era or from a different branch.  Just like when you are in school, you wouldn't dream of taking advanced calculus without taking basic algebra first.  Now, I don't think all of the technologies require a pre-requisite, but many of them should. 

As far as the layout or design, I found things I like and disliked in both ES1 and EL tech screens.  There were many techs in ES1 that I felt were mandatory to have that you had to get a tech that was never used before you could get to it. I found finding technologies in EL much easier when planning on what route I wanted to take for my end-game. 

Another +1 that generally liked the ES1 techtree over EL and now ES2. 

I don't mind the freeform nature of the current tree, but don't like the rising cost model, at least not to this extent. If late game I can research tier 1 techs in a single turn, well....that's fine to me, I would rather have more fixed cost techs.

Yes it just fells weird that researching advanced guns then going back and having a tougher time researching basic guns it just doesn't feel right i like the idea that military improvements come along with civilian ones but i just feel the current model doesn't express that very well as we have stated before its a tough issue but i think more trees is the answer here

Without reverting to a tech tree, I think a quick fix could be done by changing the way tech cost increase. Here is how I would see it:

• The cost of the tech from an era scale from the first to the Nth (N being the number of tech required to get to next era)
• The tech beyond the Nth cost the same as the Nth one (no more price increase)
• Tech from previous era don't impact tech cost from later era

That way spending some time to research previous era tech is just a time investment and won't penalize you as much. It change the system from being "choose which tech to left behind" to "choose which tech to get right here and now, and get the rest later on if you need it / don't have to rush". Since the price of remaining tech would't change anymore, you could get them faster at a later point in the game wth a bigger science output. This way you still skip some tech, but if you have to go back it won' t penalize you more than a few turns spend to research it instead of rushing era and in case of emergency you can quickly research early tech (like in ES1 when you qucikly catch up a bit on the military tech tree when a war is about to start) 

Well, I fell like or actually am the only one who hadn't played ES1 before! ^^'' (Jumped into the endless series in EL)

By that, I'm used to the freeform techtree of EL and I liked this because I haven't seen such a way of developing techs through the game. 

But here in ES2, it feels really off. Starting with the point, that you have to get tech to colonize certain planets (which you can't know beforehand) to the decision if and when to get military tech and it's impact. 

I like the general criticism here in this thread and I really hope it get's remarked by the devs. This is a really important topic.

Uh.

Wow, so apparently everyone is really against the ES2/EL style of tech progression.

I just....I don't understand.  The ES1 style is more familiar and essentially just a visual copy of Civilizations.  Why is that so compelling, compared to the Era tree?

Someone mentioned earlier that you don't have to research the military techs if you aren't at war, and that ES1's tree was better because you didn't have *wasted* tech lying around like that.

Let me put this in context.  In EL and ES2, you get to choose exactly which techs to avoid and which to use to fit your play.  In ES1, you HAD to pick the useless techs that you didn't need because there was always some advanced tech that required it as a prereq.  Just like Civ, it's essentially a car on rails giving you the illusion of choice while you ramp up your science production.  In the Era tree, you are given a list of equal choices with specific consequences. 

The learning curve is steeper and the balance is generally more difficult, but that's what makes it so interesting.  That's why ES2 and EL are doing it right: they took the formula and threw it out the window, then burned the house down.  
This is a strategy game.  Perhaps you guys should learn to, idk, strategize.

TL;DR:

ES1's tech tree is a copy of Civ and very boring.  ES2's Era tree gives actual, meaningful choice.  What's not to love?

Mered4 wrote:

Uh.

Wow, so apparently everyone is really against the ES2/EL style of tech progression.

I just....I don't understand.  The ES1 style is more familiar and essentially just a visual copy of Civilizations.  Why is that so compelling, compared to the Era tree?

Someone mentioned earlier that you don't have to research the military techs if you aren't at war, and that ES1's tree was better because you didn't have *wasted* tech lying around like that.

Let me put this in context.  In EL and ES2, you get to choose exactly which techs to avoid and which to use to fit your play.  In ES1, you HAD to pick the useless techs that you didn't need because there was always some advanced tech that required it as a prereq.  Just like Civ, it's essentially a car on rails giving you the illusion of choice while you ramp up your science production.  In the Era tree, you are given a list of equal choices with specific consequences. 

The learning curve is steeper and the balance is generally more difficult, but that's what makes it so interesting.  That's why ES2 and EL are doing it right: they took the formula and threw it out the window, then burned the house down.  
This is a strategy game.  Perhaps you guys should learn to, idk, strategize.

TL;DR:

ES1's tech tree is a copy of Civ and very boring.  ES2's Era tree gives actual, meaningful choice.  What's not to love?

I would argue that the choices aren't any more meaningful than in ES1. Ultimately there are still the key techs that you are going to have to take, except there are also bad choices that can mess you up if your not careful.

Mered4 wrote:

Uh.

Wow, so apparently everyone is really against the ES2/EL style of tech progression.

I just....I don't understand.  The ES1 style is more familiar and essentially just a visual copy of Civilizations.  Why is that so compelling, compared to the Era tree?

Someone mentioned earlier that you don't have to research the military techs if you aren't at war, and that ES1's tree was better because you didn't have *wasted* tech lying around like that.

Let me put this in context.  In EL and ES2, you get to choose exactly which techs to avoid and which to use to fit your play.  In ES1, you HAD to pick the useless techs that you didn't need because there was always some advanced tech that required it as a prereq.  Just like Civ, it's essentially a car on rails giving you the illusion of choice while you ramp up your science production.  In the Era tree, you are given a list of equal choices with specific consequences. 

The learning curve is steeper and the balance is generally more difficult, but that's what makes it so interesting.  That's why ES2 and EL are doing it right: they took the formula and threw it out the window, then burned the house down.  
This is a strategy game.  Perhaps you guys should learn to, idk, strategize.

TL;DR:

ES1's tech tree is a copy of Civ and very boring.  ES2's Era tree gives actual, meaningful choice.  What's not to love?

I liked EL's system. I just didn't like how researching more tech made science costs rise, even for previous era tech. That just didn't make any sense to me lore-wise. I guess the rising costs makes it so that your first choices in a new era are more important, but for previous eras, i don't know why it makes sense. Like I said, EL's system gave meaningful choices because the techs were specialized enough to be useful in different circumstances. I just don't like how the system meshes with colonization tech, which was not present in EL. It seems like a major pain to have 4 colonization techs in each era.

I wonder if you could hybridize the tree by have a base line of progression techs that have set values, with scaling specialization techs. This way you could start as a trading/industrial civ that around mid game is doing era 3 specializations techs that take many turns to research. Then when the cravers show up or someone stabs you in the back you can fall back on early basic techs that only take a few turns to complete. So for example the military section could be like this: The basic progression techs could be enhanced tier weapons and armor, not ones that require strategic resources, while the specialization ones are the ones that require strategic resources. Same goes for colonization. Instead of having techs that research specific biomes it would be by temperature instead. Like colonize: dry, hot, cold, frozen, ect. and would have a FIDSI malus for not having  the specific planet biome researched.

          I think the biggest disconnect between the ES2 and EL with this tech system is how things play out in what you need to not get screwed department.  The need for colony techs is the big offender to my mind, you end up having to impact all the rest of your tech choices just to use territory.  This wasn't a problem in EL where you could put a city down on any region regardless of techs researched, you might have a bias towards one kind of region or another but you didn't have to put an effort into just being allowed to use the real estate you had.  On the military hand it sounds like there probably needs to be a better reason to take preliminary techs, either a bonus to research rate or a set of bonuses that mean taking the best tech doesn't necessarily mean that you have the better ships.  It is a hard bit of balance that is made worse by it being still so early in in EA.  For my two cents while the tech tree of ES felt more natural I did like that EL's system prevented those immediate reversal's where someone overnight's a basic military set up.  At the moment I think it suffers from too many required techs that either have an immediate need or never come into play.  The colony techs as I mentioned are the big offenders they are too vital to even using anything you find they were my least favorite aspect of ES while they make sense they often create a hard lock that cramps a player's ability to expand or make full use of their systems with the scaling tech costs they turn into a bit of a back breaker one way or the other, you either get to make use of your territory or spent too much time and effort dumped down a tech that turned out useless.  

I like what your saying Optional, some kind of core progression with then optional spheres of research around it that are harder to research and then this split among the groups maybe so the colony tree has something like basic habitats giving you the most common and easy planets like arid, tundra, temperate and tropical then specialist techs like say radiation shields gives you access to desert or arctic or barren planets some kind of system that allows for strategic shifts in gameplay and not locking you into something that becomes nonviable.

One option to colonization techs would be to integrate them into the era system. So with each era certain techs get unlocked. 

Fenrakk101 wrote:

- Add a generic weapons tech that doesn't require any special resources.

I think advancing eras already gives you upgrades to the generic weapons, just like in EL. 

The box aesthetic of the research screen matches every other status screen, which are all rectangular except for the empire summary screen, which is based on hexagons. But I do agree that it's less interesting to look at. In ES1 I loved exploring the tech trees and reading the tidbits about what cool advances were happening to unlock these new features. I don't really get the same feeling of scientific advancement from advancing through eras as much as I did from advancing through a tree.

I think the current tech tree punishes players too hard for their starting conditions. It would be more satisfying if I was rewarded or punished for my own choices, not the types of planets that were around me. The eras tech tree worked well in EL. The system is less effective in ES2 because of the addition of colonization techs and the lower number of specialized techs, which doesn't allow for much variance in tech choices. 

I can see why the devs wouldn't want to roll back to the tech tree, which is pretty much the generic go-to for all 4X games. But as it stands right now, the eras tech system is simply more frustrating than interesting. 

Stalker0 wrote:

One option to colonization techs would be to integrate them into the era system. So with each era certain techs get unlocked. 

I like this, but feel like the more you lump techs into advancing eras, the less impact the player's choices in tech has. I think something like allowing factions to colonize every type of planet from the era with a FIDSI malus until the tech is researched could be more interesting.