At the moment, connected techs do not seem have any meaning other than being a path to get to the next one further down the tree. For me this feels weird, and leads to some strange possible research paths.



An example of what I find weird is that you can on the exploration tree chose a path to get Mass Particle Displacement, which gives you Second Gen Warp, without first having to research Atmospheric Filtration for Warp Drive.

Another perfect example of this is the entire military tree. All you need to do is follow a path to Positron Containment. Then you can just branch left or right to get high level versions of each weapon/defense system without having to research the previous ones.



My suggestion basically boils down to the following proverb: We must learn to walk before we can run.



What this means is that the techs themselves should be connected as to naturally follow each other, and thus require all previous connected techs to start research.

An alternative would be to make the actual improvements/equipment have prerequisites i.e. to get the benefit of Second Gen Warp, you must have first researched Warp Drive.



Personally I like the second option more as it's not as restrictive to how you arrange the tech tree, while still allowing logical prerequisites for actually gaining the benefits from researching a tech.



Thoughts on this?