I really like the shear amount of tech in the game so far, in fact I would love more. But something that might help with the above two points as well as add to the game over all might be doing the following.eleazar wrote: ......
- * Tech tree is still a pain to use. We've cut a lot of deadwood, but i increasingly suspect that removing deadwood will never make it user-friendly. Branching is usually very hard to follow, and when zoomed out far enough to get a partial overview-- even on my 2560x1440 screen, turns icons and labels into pixel-mush. We've discussed moving to a semi-random-removal tree and/or a columnar "tree". If we are going to change the format, the sooner the better.
...
- * Further species differentiation
Separate the tree tech tree into different types of technology, Energy, Organic, Mechanical, maybe even sub types of these. Some technologies would be universal.
Now assign different types of tech to different types of species. These would be "Native" and naturally occur to those type of species meaning they would be visible on the tech tree. Non-Native types would be start invisible and would cost 1.5x to research. For non-native tech to become visible it would have to be "traded."
I.E. tech trading wouldn't give you tech but give you access to researching tech you wouldn't normally know about. Also any races that you have picked up would make that species native tech visible, this would also remove the 1.5 tech multiplier from that tech.
This would artificially narrow the trees by species but would allow those who want access to all techs to attempt to do so. It would also flavor species by ships types.