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Alright, so this is more of a 'future Masters of Orion' post, but it could be adapted to a civ game with a sufficiently complex and varied tech tree aswell.
I was thinking about the tech trees in the Masters of Orion games - how the first two allow you to specialize your path by choosing certain techs over others, while the third randomizes the techs available to you. They both add to the uniqueness of the different empires in their own way, but I think to trully get unique empires you have to make use of a much more complicated system that combines the two.
I'll explain it through example
The game starts and you are presented with a message along the lines of "we've entered a new era of space travel, what should our priorities be?" and you can then choose between the different categories of tech - industry and manufacturing, economy, social studies, biology, ect... When you chose a priority all of the techs in that category become available for you to choose from, while the other tech categories will only be partially available. It could also work by assigning different priorities to each individual category to determine exactly how much is available.
Now you start choosing technologies to research and it goes pretty much the same as usual, except that you will sometimes come to a fork in the tech tree that forces you to chose one tech over the other, and causes your empire to go down a path slightly different then other's might. On top of that, every so often, you will get the opportunity to research a 'special' technology that is not otherwise available through usual research and is considerably more powerful then the usual techs. The special technology would belong to the category you prioritised, but due to the uniqueness of the technology it requires your scientists to sacrifice other work to persue it - so you have to eliminate a number of future technology choices to gain acess to it. You can choose what categories the technologies are eliminated from, and perhaps even specific fields in those categories, but technologies outside of your prioritised group would be less valued and would require more to be eliminated for the special tech. There should also be some variety of special technologies aswell, with different ones in each game and perhaps have it determined through analyzing the techs you've researched to date. (ie. an empire that's been religously researching ship armour might discover some sort of super-alloy that gives them unsurpassed hulls)
The game can also be divided up into eras, which would allow you to change the focus of your research through the course of the game, and also be used to spread out different groups of 'special technologies' so you don't end up researching some mega-weapon at the start of the game.
I was thinking about the tech trees in the Masters of Orion games - how the first two allow you to specialize your path by choosing certain techs over others, while the third randomizes the techs available to you. They both add to the uniqueness of the different empires in their own way, but I think to trully get unique empires you have to make use of a much more complicated system that combines the two.
I'll explain it through example
The game starts and you are presented with a message along the lines of "we've entered a new era of space travel, what should our priorities be?" and you can then choose between the different categories of tech - industry and manufacturing, economy, social studies, biology, ect... When you chose a priority all of the techs in that category become available for you to choose from, while the other tech categories will only be partially available. It could also work by assigning different priorities to each individual category to determine exactly how much is available.
Now you start choosing technologies to research and it goes pretty much the same as usual, except that you will sometimes come to a fork in the tech tree that forces you to chose one tech over the other, and causes your empire to go down a path slightly different then other's might. On top of that, every so often, you will get the opportunity to research a 'special' technology that is not otherwise available through usual research and is considerably more powerful then the usual techs. The special technology would belong to the category you prioritised, but due to the uniqueness of the technology it requires your scientists to sacrifice other work to persue it - so you have to eliminate a number of future technology choices to gain acess to it. You can choose what categories the technologies are eliminated from, and perhaps even specific fields in those categories, but technologies outside of your prioritised group would be less valued and would require more to be eliminated for the special tech. There should also be some variety of special technologies aswell, with different ones in each game and perhaps have it determined through analyzing the techs you've researched to date. (ie. an empire that's been religously researching ship armour might discover some sort of super-alloy that gives them unsurpassed hulls)
The game can also be divided up into eras, which would allow you to change the focus of your research through the course of the game, and also be used to spread out different groups of 'special technologies' so you don't end up researching some mega-weapon at the start of the game.
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