Pressing issues to address in the tech tree

[Oberlus]

I'd need to know what the community thinks is the most pressing issue (or issues) to address [regarding the tech tree, balancing, and other FOCS-only related stuff].

[Ophiuchus]

Hm. I am a bit unsure what the question is. "Pressing" sounds like fixing immediate balancing/contents problems (hmm stargates?)

For tech tree rework the question is not about immediate problems but much more general and is not so much about "issues" but in my opionon about structure and design philosophy.

Some suggestions:

General Structure

• as there will be still a lot of major technical changes (e.g. policies, influence, reworked stealth, reworked stockpile contents), designing the tech tree for easy rebalancing is the most important. I dont have a suggestion to do that (maybe its impossible), developing a approach/framework/conceptual model seems more reachable. The other approach is see what works and rework every time something changes. It makes sense to define when such balancing should be started/finished. Also having tools to assess a tech tree would be helpful (e.g. we have a spreadsheet of all species, its easy to compare which species compete for which environment.
• recognizable structure helps understanding tech choices (e.g. see the weapon types and improvement system) and also rebalancing

Contents and Balancing

• hull lines - These should have a distinct feel but should be comparably powerful. An empire should usually commit to one hull line and be comparably equal in power to another empire with the same level of resources, so the empires you encounter are more different. Examples for such an commitment: in order to build ships or shipyards for one hull line you need to have the corresponding policy enabled; or in order to unlock another hull line you have to spend resources (e.g. influence) which triples each time you unlock another hull line (so exponential cost).
• growth techs - late game tech should minimize the difference between environments but they should still matter (so species choice should matter per planet)
• weapon systems - actually i love the current balance of weapon kinds and improvements. you have choices to skip weapon levels in order to save research points, but sometimes its more helpful to have earlier access to. I think there could be some minor variations to make the weapon types more distinct, but this is not really necessary.
• stockpiling - should make distributed empires possible if there is commitment. For GREAT_STOCKPILING species this should be possible from the start. (Probably Oberlus and me will be able to contribute here)