Tech "Bloat" makes tech progress feel awkward

[beckermt]

In my experience, the amount of techs has massively increased, which is leading to the situation where lower tier techs become increasingly rare over time, which can lead to weird holes in your tech tree.

Some examples:
The year is 2290. My research isn't great, but it's passable. I have skipped the robots tech two times, since I didn't intend to build them. However, the last time the tech showed up was 40 years ago (or so) and I'd really like to take the Flesh is Weak. I am considering just console commanding myself the techs, because Oh My Shroud.

Different game:
The year is 2305. My most recent society tech was Gene Tailoring (FINALLY). The one before that was Eco Simulation (+10% Farmer output) a Tier 1 tech that can be in the first draw of cards. I STILL do not have the planetary building for boosting Farmer output, because I hadn't rolled Eco Simulation in decades.

Lower tier techs need their weights massively increased, if they are the requirement for other important techs. Things like +10% Pop Growth can be left as they are. They don't lead to important gameplay-changing bonuses, they are simply numerical boosts.

 

[Rios_]

In terms of total techs the research tree is not that much larger, but it's broader at the bottom, which means that at any given point in the game your likely to have more techs available to you then before. You can kind of mitigate it by not researching weapon techs (which have lots of offshoot techs), or by always trying to research the lowest tiers of techs you have available to you on a screen (so you don't bloat the pool of techs by unlocking tier 3 techs before you've got all the tier 1 ones you want and so on), but they bring their own problems (RNG for the latter, having a crap military for the former).

 

[Tavior]

Tech bloating was already kind of a thing in older patch where I would be unlocking antimatter powerplanet ship module but still yet to unlock the basic tier 2 powerplanet upgrade building.

All new tech introduced in 2.2 to replace the old pre-2.2 ones just made it even more pronounced than older versions.

 

[KaiserWilhelmI]

I too have noticed this in my current game where most of my warship techs were at tier III and few even at tier IV, yet my armor was still at tier I, because the tech just hasn't showed up after the first decades.

 

[RyanDA]

I think the default number of tech cards needs to be increased to 4.