Hello,

I've had this game for about 2 weeks now and have so far plunked in 10 hours of gameplay on the limited edition. I really love tech trees and science overall so I've mainly been playing Sophons but have also tried a few other races.

I'm not bashing the tech trees for being incomplete or lazy, not in the slightest. After actually reading the text of all of the upgrades it shows how much time and effort the developers pumped into making a humorous and unique tech tree. But there is still some minor problems and suggestions *I* have with it:

• Some Tech Trees such as the transport one are almost completely useless after the essential upgrades
• All the tech trees don't really have their own "supertech" at the end and mainly just lead into scientific victory improvements
• Some Tech Trees such as the economic one are mainly pointless at the beginning and have the essential upgrades too far into the tree
• Most of the time you have to dedicate to the science tree and be too balanced- you do not get an advantage to sticking to one tree
  
  

Most of these complaints all seguay into one major one: you can't really be "Tech-economic" or "Tech-transport", you have to balance out too much. Maybe I'm missing the point, but I feel that there should be advantages to sticking to one or two trees as well- that way strategies can vary out accordingly. Currently as it goes you sort of have to spend tech points on getting more tech points (science tree) and even if you're not going for the scientific victory you'll still have so many tech points by the end of it that all you can do is spend them on the science tree after yours is done. I'd really like to see something (a little less extreme maybe) like the scientific end for each tree- maybe a really powerful but slow new class of ship for transport? A shield generator for military? Being able to take over stars with trade routes ala spore for economic? I'm not too sure. Overall I'd just like a better conclusion to the three other tech trees.



Also, I'm sort of really tripping over my words and ideas right now. Bleh. Going to take a walk and come look back at this.



-Kerma

Thanks for the feedback! I'm not sure which tech trees you mean by "transport" "economic" and "science". We usually refer to them as left/right/up/down or north/south/east/west. If you have not done much with the left tree (I guess that is what you mean by economic) then you may find it very difficult to grow fast enough to keep up with the AI. In particular endless supermarkets and colonial rights are critical to get happiness and production up.



You may be interested to try my "30 turn challenge" to see how well you do. I found that after examining the best save games, my play got much better. I find the tech tradeoffs very important at each level. I have not played huge or slow games yet, 50+ hours into the game, and I have not come to the end of any of the tech trees yet. (Of course you may be a better player than I am :-)



/#/endless-space/forum/27-general/thread/8097-30-turn-challenge-help-me-learn

Thanks for the reply, dave!

I guess looking back on it I understand that all trees have their uses, including economic, but in my opinion it still stands that you sort are forced to just put points into every tech and are not too rewarded for specializing (actually I found that specializing in (for example) the left tree that I started to sink to 4th place in technology and soon after overall rating. The way I see it currently is the fact that you are barely rewarded for specializing on one or two trees. Maybe it's supposed to be that way.



As for the 30 day challenge I will check it out! It sounds interesting.

-Kerma

I view it as a feature, not a bug, that you must expand in all four branches of the tech tree. But YMMV.



BTW it is a thirty "turn" challenge, not days. You can complete it in an hour or so, depending on how quickly you push all the buttons.