Oh come on now, not everything is overpowered. 9/10 scissors players agree that paper is perfectly balanced!

You really shouldn't be able to put "all" your points into one tree. The research cost is exponential and unless you city and study-spam to make up for it, you won't be able to keep investing in one tree until you have a rich economy... even if each tree has a good way of boosting your economy.

You should be able to divide all your points between 2 or 3 trees and be perfectly competitive. In fact, I believe that's what the meta will mostly be, with maybe the 4th and 5th trees just having a few levels put into them at the beginning of the game when the high-research costs are overbearing, nothing more. But just one tree is irrational and romanticized. It doesn't make sense when you consider how research costs work. 

I'd enjoy playing some one-tree-only games as a special challenge, but I'm thinking it'll be decidely non-optimal. And that's okay. It really doesn't make sense for EVERY tree to have an answer to every problem. Now, I think it'd be a good design goal for no tree to have the ONLY solution to a problem, either. Each major need should have a couple of different choices, so that none of the trees are absolutely must-have.

Pls read the link I've posted in the previous page.   The intention is to have a good design, and why it is great is already presented there.

I did read it. It's very well-written, but I disagree. I think that wanting each tree to be able to stand entirely on its own is an arbitrary goal rather than inherently good design.  It's not BAD design (though I find it rather redundant), but it's not necessary. The goal of having a variety of economies and paths to victory IS good design, but there are several ways of accomplishing it.

Also, I think the idea that any real-world civilization has focused ENTIRELY on one branch of endeavor is a narrow view of things. I would have characterized the Italian city-states as combining civics and diplomacy...and Venice (for instance) also had a substantial navy, crewed by residents not mercenaries.

Why limit yourself to five? If you balance for the case in which everyone pursues *two* tech trees, you have 10 different combinations, each of which would play differently. Designing in the expectation of the trees being combined in various ways increases variation.

We have different ideas of what would make for the best design. Hopefully we'll both enjoy whatever gets released

I don't agree that costs alone should be a reason to divide your research power into different trees. The higher the costs are for a tree in the end, the more powerfull the breakthrough has to be. Otherwise everybody would divide his research into even 4 tree's.. and afterwards there is no real difference anymore in the playstyle. I'm more interested to see battles where someone is focusing into magic where to counterpart is focusing on war

This'll be interesting, because higher costs don't DIRECTLY mean more powerful breakthroughs. The cost (breakthrough time) is incurred before you actually indicate which breakthrough you want. I'm not clear yet on whether the time is based only on the total number of breakthroughs you already have in that category, or if it's influenced by the level/rarity of the ones you got. Anyone know?

Anyway, if we assume for now that it's based purely on how many breakthroughs you have, and we also assume that the advances 'deepest' into the trees are the most powerful, then the way to maximize power-per-turn-of-research is to dive straight down a tree rather than spreading out into multiple branches within the same tree.

If you spend 100 turns researching nukes so you can insta-win, that's great and all. But if you go to war with someone who has been investing research points elsewhere for 50 of those turns, then they'll come at you with a more sophisticated army and tear you up. That's the point I'm trying to make.

Its UP