Cronstintein wrote:

Here's my personal list, feel free to add your own or disagree with anything I put in here.

• Buyout of production
• Basic diplomacy options, especially declaring war!  If you want to prevent early invasions, just remove manpower from the exploration vessels.
• Interacting with minor factions.  I'm hoping they have plans to flesh out this system a bit.  Having your only option to buy them out or kill them seems overly limited.  At the very least there should be a way to spend influence to raise their opinion over time.
• System Development Projects.  Just seems weird the way this whole subsystem is set up.  It's difficult to make good use of luxury resources.
• Trade HQ and subsidiaries.

Things that don't quite fit the list:

• Strategic resource acquisition.  You should probably have some useful modules combined with the tech to dig them up.
• Ship hulls should probably be in the military tree.  They are probably the most powerful military techs, so it seems weird that they're shunted off into their own group.

I don't mind per se that they are locked behind tech, but it does just feel like there's not enough to do and the rate that you unlock them is a bit too slow.

Maybe instead of unlocking them, you could start with a surplus of Science, and so the first tech or two that you research is built instantly. That you can get to the thing you want to do faster, but you still have to make choices about which path you want to take rather than just having them all by default.

I'm often advocating for having technology trees that focus on unlocking new abilities / capabilities rather than things that just provide buffs and number's boosts.  It's nice to see that ES2 has mostly gone in this direction.

However - I think far to many of the technologies are essential to any playthrough (i.e. many of the one's the OP identified).  When huge parts of the gameplay are locked behind a tech, that tech is pretty much essential and so there really aren't any big choices or decisions to make in the tech tree.

I don't know what the solution is per se.  I also don't feel like it's a huge issue - since the tech progression in the game is pretty quick.  But the whole tech system feels somewhat dull as a result. 

Still pondering my feelings before providing more comprehensive feedback on the tech tree....

Thought I read where you had to unlock armor and aircraft through the tech tree but now I can't find that reference.  Frankly, that makes no sense considering these are space age races.  Surely if you start the game with starships then you should have armor and aircraft without needing to research them first.  I can see unlocking advances for both, but you should get basic armor and aircraft at the start of the game.

Geezer wrote:

Thought I read where you had to unlock armor and aircraft through the tech tree but now I can't find that reference.  Frankly, that makes no sense considering these are space age races.  Surely if you start the game with starships then you should have armor and aircraft without needing to research them first.  I can see unlocking advances for both, but you should get basic armor and aircraft at the start of the game.

Armored ground units are an ERA III tech combined with carriers, I believe.