Directed or Un-directed research?

[dgh64]

I always do directed. I like to be the first to get Secrets of the Human Brain, which means I always do Ecology, Biogenetics, and Social Psych in that order.

Except sometimes I open a pod and get Industrial Base or Applied Physics, and then for some reason Secrets isn't one of the options, even though I have both prereqs for it. Anyone know why that is? Why sometimes you have the prereqs for something but it doesn't show up?

[CEO Aaron]

Just a function of the tech selection engine. There's lengthy posts about it if you care to avail yourself of search, but suffice to say that depending on your current techs, some techs will be unavailable to you, even if you satisfy the requirements to research them immediately.

Even 'Blind' research you get to establish priorities, so the realism argument is kind of soft either way.

I think the reason the developers made blind research the default was to buffer new players from the complexity of learning a new tech tree from scratch. At least the Civilization tech tree is somewhat intuitive. Everyone knows what writing is and what it does, more or less. What's 'Biogenics', devoid of the actual game mechanics?