This is going to be a much more complex and controversial idea, I believe: Move all empire improvements which are vitally important, or are common prerequisites for techs in other quadrants, such as Strategic Resources, hyperspace tech, and System Development Projects, to be unlocked through Technology Stage unlocks by Technology Stage 4, to prevent the dominance of any one quadrant and create space for more interesting and meaningful empire and system improvements, thus reducing the number of false choices between essential and nonessential techs.


Endless Space 2 currently has a bit of a problem with dominant strategy- certain choices are just better and are necessary to enable other dominant strategies. You need Stage 4 or 5 Economy and Trade to make Stages 4 or 5 of any other quadrant effective beyond a very small empire with lucky Curiosity rolls; eschewing Hyperspace will halt your expansion and exploration until you research it, leaving more of everything for your opponents. Any strategy that doesn't include these had better plan to win the game within the first 50 turns.


These are weakly dominant strategies, because while they may not always dominate other strategies, they are themselves never dominated by another strategy. They present a false strategic choice where one answer is always correct and thus the default, with other potential choices being neutered by the fact that you didn't take the choice you were supposed to. Technologies should be reserved for interesting decisions between similarly viable choices that allow us to consider our strategic approach, while these necessary empire improvements should become simple unlocks rather than the strategic mandatory choices they are now.


These changes are paritcularly important because unlike an Endless Legend system of Era's, we can only progress in our preferred techs at the cost of progress with other techs, instead of being able to simultaneously access all techs of a given tier regardless of our previous research decisions.