Did you know that you can zoom the bottom part in and out to see more or less as you need?

Bakka

Yeah, I was a bit over-whelmed at first as well. When I started to play the Arceans I was losing money really fast, I couldn't find the tech that gave me Marketplaces. I thought to myself, maybe Arceans don't get Marketplaces and I have to adapt my strategy. Of course as I played I eventually figured it out.

I agree that either a racial description highlighting some of the differences in play style you can expect, or maybe just a big printable tech tree for each race that we print out and look at while we play.

In the maximized view of the tech tree screen, you can right-click individual techs to get all of the data that you would normally see in the smaller view.  This has been in the game since at least Dreadlords, though it isn't the most publicized of features.

Hope that helps!

~C

They ARE synchronized in our current build of Twilight, (and most likely in Beta1, though I'm not sure) .  I guess that's another thing for you to look forward to in the new game.

By the way, your example of a specific tech (Planetary Invasion) was helpful so that I could run the game and quickly verify what is happening.  Examples like that give us the info we need to reproduce what you are seeing and then investigate why so we can fix them.

Kudos to you for having the sense to give us developers something specific to go check out.

Thanks,

~C

Agree with this. A simple one window tech view could be made that showed all the information you needed.

I think Civ 4 has about the best tech tree interface I've seen. When you click a technology it automatically highlights all techs needed to get there and queues those up to be researched.
If you hover over the tech it gives you all the details (description, benefits, buildings, units). There are little icons for units available and buildings and hovering over any of those gives you details on each of those.

I honestly have never liked the two window view of the GalCiv tech tree. I'd go for one big window. Either hover or with a right click it will popup a window with all the details on the tech (as you find today in the upper screen). It would also be nice to have things like ships or buildings be hyperlinks and when clicked on would bring up details about them (not sure if it's possible) and when cleared gets you back to the research screen.

I'd also have various button along the top to sort or highlight the tech tree in various ways (like you have now on various screens like the colony/ship screen).
Things like "racial techs" which would highlight all the racial specific techs for you and the ones you've acquired in trades from other races. This might help the above request to get an overview of the new techs.

One thing I always find confusing is actually finding a tech needed to do a certain thing like get a starbase or mining module upgrade. So maybe a button for "starbase/mining upgrades" which would then highlight any tech that grants a new starbase module. A "ships" button which would highlight any tech that allowed a new ship to be built.

And allow multiple techs to be queued up. Maybe a "research governor" is needed where you can queue up techs. This would then allow for something like this for example: I want to build a certain starbase module. I found the tech that grants that module. I can then click on that tech and choose to queue up all the techs needed for it in the governor.

An extension of the "ships" button might be to search (or have a list) for a ship model by name. Say a "Scout" or "Battleship Mk 2-2". It would then highlight every tech needed to enable the building of that ship. I could then queue up all those techs in the research governor queue. Right now when I figure out I really need a certain ship type to counter the AI I have to hunt and peck the tech tree to figure out what I need to research so I can build that counter.

How's that for a start?

Just wanted to bump this, since I finally sorted out my thoughts about possible improvements.

First, we really need the right mouse click to NOT SELECT a tech for current research. That's what the left button is for. Too many times, I've been in either of the two screens and right-clicked on something for more info, only to have it select that research. And now I have to remember what it was I was trying to research currently. You can get info on a future tech by right clicking if it's far enough down the tree, but it will select AS WELL as giving you the info, if it's currently available.

For consistency, it should work like the techs available for trade from another race in the diplomatic contact/trade screen: right click for more info, left click to select. This should be very simple to change.

If I were able to wave a magic wand and just redesign the tree interface... the first goal would be to get rid of the two separate views. That makes no sense to me. The three important things to see are 1) the overall tree, zoomable and pan-able (which the alternate view does), and 2) more detailed info on each tech with a right click, and 3) a list sorted by time, cost, etc.

Put that all on just one screen. Make the text for the sorted list a little smaller and run that as a column down the left side of the screen. We'd lose a little horizontal space on the tree view, but the full tree (in TA anyway) is more vertical than horizontal, if you ignore the extreme end of the tech victory path. That's why the mini-view of the tree in the default view is so annoying... you need to go vertical more than horizontal most times, and it's just too vertically cramped. But if you go to the full tree view, you lose the sorted list for remaining time, etc.

After putting the sorted list on the left, give us an info panel that pops up when we right-click on a tech. We have that now (not perfectly synchronized, as per above post), but please make it larger. The popup is too small... we shouldn't have to scroll within the window to see the info. Also, as a minor point, on the text detail panel I'd like to see the main bonuses and future tech listed first, with any new ships it makes available sorted down at the bottom instead of the top (like the way the current small popup panel works).

If that's too ambitious, I'd settle for being able to grab the horizontal divider line in the default view between the bottom tree and the top detai window/sorted list, and just drag that up to get a larger tree view. There's a ton of wasted space in that upper right detail panel, in the default view.

For the TA expansion -- the icons at the bottom and popup window is a good start, but there is still a bunch of missing info (I assume this is work in progress). I click on lots of little building icon improvements where I have no idea what benefit I'm going to get from it. I'll eventually learn that from playing the game long enough, but it's the kind of info a newbie can really use.