Sounds good from a gameplay standpoint, but for modders (like myself) I hope that there is a cheat to make them all appear: debugging when you have to continually reload and tempt the RNG does NOT sound like fun.

I def love never ending tech, as I feel bad when all the infrastructure I put into teching is made useless.  And I love a good turtle...

I think I'm going to have to mod in hot air balloon tech as one of the rare possibilities. Might as well throw clockwork and steampunk in there while I'm at it.

From the sound of it, you could always just make a tech tagged as a core technology until you're done debugging.

Although I wouldn't mind a game option to force all techs to be in the game.

I think Landi already asked this but I'm curious to know how the tech randomization will actually work. Will these randomized techs be available to every faction in a given game? Or will randomized techs differ from faction to faction in a given game? I think the latter would be cool. It would defnitely make each faction more unique.

Also why on earth would any one keep reloading in order to find a certain tech? Can you not just go with whatever the RNG provides? Is that not the point?

I think that Brad implied it could work either way, considering that we will have faction-specific tech trees: it seems like the RNG starts with a tree that has all of the techs in it, then removes some that are not marked as "always include". Whether the techs it "prunes" are faction-specific or not is up to chance. Given the paucity of information, however, this is only my best guess.

Anybody notice that glow in the upper left of the "education" tech's area?   It looks like  the light shinning through the clouds has clipped out of the emblem circle into the black area.

either that or the little compass looking thing and that glow is ' "selection cursor" of some kind, in which case we really need to get something more apparent.

I like it! I hope the research is far more interesting than it was in GalCiv2.

I see it, and I think it's a "completion counter": as you research more and more into the tech, that glow expands around the ring. Here, it appears that Brad only put about one RP into the tech.

The "few technologies, but with infinite levels" looks nice in my view. It makes me wonder how trading technologies would work though. Will we be able to trade directly the upper tech level we know, or will we simply give them a boost. Ex : I have Housing level 4, and I want to give it to someone with only Housing level 1. Will he goes straight to level 4, or will he either get a big research bonus until he reaches level 4, or either get midway between both, getting to level 2?

Def should not get full tech in trading, bad balance for multiplayer games.

This will only be useful if there are bonuses for researching several things at once. In Dominions you can split research as you like but it's mostly less efficient than focusing on one path then the next. In MOO (1), splitting research could be beneficial as it gave you a slightly better research rate, but getting tech1 on turn 10 and tech 2 on turn 20 remained better than getting both techs on turn 19 in 99% of the cases.

I hope Elemental will feature something which really boosts multiple/parallel research, otherwise it will just be a waste of techs and UI space.

Capitalism 2 did something similar with research labs. The more labs you put working on one project, the less benefit each one gives. Lets say the first one gives 10 points, the second one would give 9 if working on the same project, the third would give 8, the next 7, etc (the max was 9). Those numbers aren't real, but they illustrate the system.

If you REALLY wanted to accelerate something you could put all 9 labs at an R&D center to work on it, and in certain cases that made sense. For the most part though you were better off spreading things out more (groups of 3 was pretty typical).