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Yup, best tech tree ever is/was SotS1, and Stellaris might be next. It should be interesting to see how nuMoO and ES 2 deal with it.
Your description assumes there'd be always a right path through tech tree. In the same way you'd have optimal random tree you'd wish you have and many players will blame the game for giving them loser tech tree.
1. You have no control whatsoever over the tech, other than allocating ressources to a specific branch. Unlike in reality, you can't have people work to discover a solution for a problem you're having, but you can only fund the field and hope they bother to invent what you really need.
2. The randomness is inherently unbalanced, and consequently, balancing different techs is tough. So either there isn't much randomness, because everything is restricted to a certain tech level, or you need an insane amount of technologies to offer enough random options while retaining tech level restrictions. And if a player gets lucky and finds a really powerful random tech, he's going to have a huge game advantage he did nothing to gain it for.
So you either need a huge amount of different techs at each level, so you can restrict discoveries to certain levels, or you won't have much random tech because there's too little choice at each level, or you'll have overpowered players through sheer luck.
3. The randomness creates unpredictable tech constellations, so AI wise, it's very difficult to have it come up with good ship designs. It wouldn't be much of a problem in the current MoO ship design, but that's because it's a "throw in highest tech" approach, without specialized designs and no tactical combat that features sophisticated mechanisms.
In a game such as Stardrive 2, for example, it would be absolutely catastrophic, considering how much Icemania's current Stardrive 2 ship design blueprint overhaul struggles with the AI design and its ability or inability to adequately decide on techs that help it.
Personally, I'd like a mixture of both. It's a bit simplistic to have your entire empire's scientists all work on the very same project, even if it's not even remotely within their area of expertise. On the other hand, technology advances aren't as accidential as they may seem from the outside. Often it's a result of specific interest supported by the interests of policymakers which leads to funding that allows breakthroughs. And when governments require specific technology as problem solver, they create institutes to research in that direction, fund think-tanks to investigate an issue and come up with solutions, etc.
So I'd personally favor a sort of random approach, where you allocate the funding for the scientific fields, within those fields, you can further determine a preferance for what you're looking for, e.g. 50% of the funding for weapon technology development, 30% for economic developments, etc.
Furthermore I'd give the player the additional option to focus research on specific technology. This is the problem solver approach, where player (and AI) can directly gain a specific technology. There should be drawbacks though. Maybe specifically researching a tech has a chance to fail, e.g. the research stalls, the scientists are exhausted, no breakthrough is discovered, and what they now need is distance so they can gather fresh ideas and approaches. But you don't get the tech this time and you can't immediately re-research it.
I also like the idea of a vague research finish line. E.g. instead of researching it once the number of neccessary points is reached, reaching it only creates the chance for a breakthrough, which increases with every turn. So once you reach the 1000 points required to gain the tech, you have a 20% chance to get it next rounds, 33% the round after that, then 48, 65, 84 until it reaches 90% or so. This makes it less predictable when you'll get the tech.
For the special research outlined above, this works the same way, except the special research project has a "deadline". So if by turn x the project hasn't been finished, it's considered a failure at this time. (Though you'll get a research speed & chance bonus next time you do research it, because they're basing their work on existing work.)
Every game I've seen with a static tech tree has generally been min/maxed into a handful of optimal paths to research based on your playstyle preferences.
Starting-Location and Tech-Options are randomized for each faction.
And in both cases it's not immediately obvious wether it'll be good or not.
You might see only 2 stars in range and think that location is terrible. But then it turns out one is a fertile Artifacts-Terran world and the other has a wormhole to 3 more colonizable systems.
You might see 6 stars in range and think that location is awesome. But then it turns out the only colonizable world is an ultra-poor-desert and all the others are asteroids or hostile environments you cannot colonize before some serious teching up.
And for tech-choices it's even more difficult. You might not get any good fuel-technology soon. You might not get a good factory-cost-reduction-tech. You might not get a good terra-forming tech.
Sometimes you'll get everything you could have wished for. Sometimes you'll get barely anything of that.
The impact of these things on the outcome of the game is going is massive.
In the end it really comes down to how the player perceives it.
Is this kind of variety a welcome challenge or does it hurt his sense of fairness?
I'd say: As long as the player still wins, he's fine with having had an uphill-battle. But some folks seem to have serious issues with the notion of being able to lose in a 4x. If there is even the slightest chance that any of the randomized things weren't in the players favour, he'll likely become vocal about the unfair odds stacked up against him.
It will help very little that "over the course of several hundred games it will eventually all even out". ^^;
That's pretty much verbatim what Master of Orion III did. It's a brilliant system, IMO. It introduces some randomness, but gives the player a degree of control over the randomness. And the diminishing returns for over-specialization means you have in-built balance and compelling decisions between specialization and generalization.
I think that's the best of two worlds, an element of randomness, but no absolute lack of control. It also deals with the AI problem of not getting key tech, because the most essential can be focus researched if they're still missing after a certain point.
Oh, yes. Yes they did. ;) I'm actually working on an eXposition about how MoO III took a bunch of stellar ideas and royally messed them all up. It's a shame; I think because of that, a lot of really good mechanics are shunned in post-MoO-III 4X games.
I think it's a very solve-able problem. The eventual plan is to look at expansion/research vectors and do a post pass on star systems and technology picks to make sure things are more or less balanced.
Also interestingly, there was Uncreative trait in MOO2 that randomed the tech you got at every level (you did not even know what you get beforehand). It was pretty rough as some technologies were very powerful so getting the wrong one set you back a lot.
Personally I would not mind randomized tech tree in singleplayer games. Although I can imagine that people playing multiplayer would be raging hard.
I haven't heard a peep, but I am pretty sure at least one of them is reading this thread every. single.day. ;)
Twice a day even, or so the little birds say.
I remember somebody saying that the failure of Master of Orion 3 set the genre back by a decade, and at first I was really skeptical of that as overblown hyperbole. But now as I have enough time under my belt to see how things progress and evolve and ideas spread I realize that the development of new games is a heavily iterative process with everybody trying to improve on the "Exemplars" of the genre, whose mechanics and DNA end up being spread to later games.
Master of Orion is like a tree overgrown with innumerable suckers and sprouts emerging from where a great branch was torn off in a storm, each one vying to be the next branch but far away from where the reaches of the canopy should have been. A Decade is a long time, but not forever, and other sources of inspiration have had to spring up to fill the gaps left by the broken lineage, many re-inventing the wheel.
Oh, and how would YOU know? You just keep conveniently coming up with all this "insider info", supported only by vague claims of being a "Director of Product Vision" or some sort of BS made-up title that gives you "connections" within the company. Go back to your parent's basement noob, and stop trolling the people who know what's really going on. :P
...
Oh, but if you manage to slip word in to somebody, tell them to pay special attention to all of the posts that *I* make. That's where the real juice is.
For example:
1. Make the choices matter more, so you're thinking 'OMG, I really want all of these, which do I pick?' There are a few like that in the present tree, but not many.
2. Make some tech choices lock out or open up later techs.
3. Link some of the tech choices to create a thematic vision for the tech of a particular player (AI or human player). For example, players who pick certain economic techs would get options for future economic techs, and so on, so you could see some races going down an economic route, others down a terraforming route, others down a production route, others down a pop route, others down a miliitary route, etc. Even lock it down so races end up strongly favouring certain military techs over others.