I'm finding that certain research items have far too big an impact on the game to be ignored in both trees. For example without the ability to create markets (the 4 tile buildings that give like 6 gold per turn) you really don't have enough gold to do anything, and without certain equipment breakthroughs your units (and cities) are completely helpless. Those are just two specific examples, basically I'm finding that all around you need to go heavy into both civ and war research at a mostly equal rate in order to be effective in any way. This discourages specialization and really removes a lot of thought from the process.

Originally I started my first game with the intent to be an aggressive nation built on warfare, but right from the start everything I was researching in warfare was useless to me since the resulting equipment or buildings were far to expensive to afford. I ended up having to go deeper into civ than warfare just to get the techs that allowed me to afford building units with any sort of equipment beyond the base club without waiting 20-50 turns.

I don't know if this is intended, if we are supposed to focus on all research paths, so I don't know if anything is wrong or needs to be corrected. I just thought I'd share my experiences and thoughts on it.

Just to throw in what I think might make it a little more customizable and fun (for me anyway) is maybe increasing the effectiveness of the basic buildings (instead of 1 gold or resources per turn each, make it 2) while at the same time reducing the cost of some buildings and equipment at the lower end of the tech. Like basic leather armor and maybe short swords, I think it's like 50 gold and resources to build one unit equipped in that, you'd need like 10 level 5 towns with basic buildings to create one of those per turn as is. Buildings that could be cheaper are the command post and watch tower, 100 gold is a lot without a ton of cities or deep(/lucky?) civ research. I think I could of course mod all that later if I wanted to.