Editted: Summary at the bottom, if you prefer not to read paragraphs:

Adventuring Unleashing WorldWide Threat

Not in the beta, but wanted to put forward some ideas.

About spawning some giant monster threat that everyone can team up against, what do you think of such an event happening by chance depending on the research poured into the adventuring tree? This could reflect that the more and more people meddling in ancient ruins and stealing powerful magical artifacts, the more chance of someone unearthing this threat and unleashing it on the world? This would also mean less chance of it happening each game, and would depend on how much each player researched into the adventuring tree.  It should depend on the level that every player researched (sort of a world adventuring level), as in if each player researched adventuring 1000x, then such an event is likely, while if one person researched it 5000x, it would not be as likely.  However, one person researching it 5000x would still have a low chance of unleashing it.

The location could be some normal adventuring location, working like a goodie hut that when someone goes to it, it automatically unleashes, maybe with a declaration to all players to tell them about the threat. How it could work is perhaps have a percentage it starts at, which grows according to adventuring techs researched or adventuring levels, and that percentage governs the percentage that it spawns on the map.  The percentage increases more if more players research than if only one person is researching it.  Perhaps it can only happen once, because if the percentage is high enough for it to happen (ie, 50%), then it is likely to happen again.  Or perhaps the precentage could decrease or reset, and the increment of precentage reduced depending on the number of times it has happened.  The difficulty of the threat could be proportional to the adventuring tech of all the kingdoms and empires too.

Civilization Tree

About the different tech trees, perhaps they could be more specialized by focussing on what the tree is about.  For civilization, going up this tree would lead to techs related to a civilization type victory.  Perhaps percentage of territory controlled would be another victory condition, and this tree would focus on building up techs that build up your empire and that sustain your empire, such as improved defenses for cities, even mobile defenses that cannot leave your territory, Guardians and Sentinels.  It could include improved resource gathering, improved city production, improved city tile number, improved territory size, improved prestige, advanced buildings (higher level markets, etc), but mainly techs that focus on building up more of an empire and continually researching up this tree would lead to it being easier to build up an empire.  Measure to prevent someone teching up this tree and then rolling over everyone with superior economy could be research, which is something that all trees could increase, depending on the amount of research poured into the tree, or in total.  Ie, if everyone could only gain base research generation through resources controlled (libraries?) and the multiplier is research expended into the tree, then research is dependent on resources controlled instead of cities multiplying the bonuses. 

Edit: Bonuses could be researched that give champions +gildar, or +materials, such as +gildar in a city, +materials outside of a city, or even mix and match with magic bonuses, with a tech in civilization (and maybe magic) where if a person already has a bonus from magic (any of the magic bonuses), they get a bonus in spell research.

A potential way to reduce city spam is to have a mechanism that the more cities owned, the less productive they (or resources controlled) are.  This means someone could spam cities, but with maintanence per city plus less production per city, they would get less productive after a while.  However, more cities means potentially more territory controlled, which leads to more resources (potentially), and also with more base resource multiplier buildings, so it could even out if a player is determined enough down this route.  Another suggestion is to have territory growth tied to city number, with more cities meaning more territory, but less cities meaning more productivity.

Edit: territory is tied to cities, but resources is still gained by territory controlled.

If the penalty for production is large enough, perhaps it could be optimal for a player to own 2 or 3 cities, then get worse and worse in terms of production until they hit some larger number, 20 or so (to be balanced), so that players are discouraged from spamming too many cities, but if they want to play that way, then eventually, they will grow, with more resources offsetting the losses.  The gamble is if they can get the resources to sustain that number of cities with the maintanence cost and decreasing production per city, as well as having less resources for defenses against other players.

The main disadvantage is the steamrolling effect once the player moves from civilization to other trees (mainly warfare) and gets more cities, which then allows them to bypass that unproductive phrase and allow them to increase their territory vastly as well as resource production.  An idea would be to have a certain number of turns of unrest after conquering a city (a suitably large number maybe, depending on the size of the city), 50 turns ~ level 1 city, 100 turns ~ level 2 city... etc, where no territory is added to the conquering player and where with no more territory, they don't get the resources in that territory yet.  The land becomes neutral or still the defending player's, but with penalty to resources owned in that area.  This time of unrest allows the defender a chance to take back the city or prepare a defense, and if the conquerer moves on quickly, taking multiple cities at a time, the disadvantage lies in defending those cities that they don't own yet, and perhaps if they leave before the time is up, the city returns to the defender.  These are just ideas, feel free to build on them or add to them or take something from them to another idea.

Warfare Tree

For the warfare tree, have techs that boost a kingdom / empire militarily. Techs that reduce build times, reduce cost, increase amount of troops trained at a time, increase amount of equipment available, increase stats, give military bonuses to units in tactical combat (high level techs) such as Courage: First strike extra damage, Endurance: change to survive last hit, Leadership: boost to something for units around, Strong: + to attack, Quick: + to combat speed/actions, Knowledgeable/Experienced: + to defense (if a unit has this (rare), perhaps more increase to defense depending on experience the unit has), etc.  In conquering, techs for less time to control a city, techs to (maybe) increase overland movement, techs for formations, as someone suggested, techs for other stuff that help one towards the Conquest Victory, whether it be unit cost decrease, time decrease, % increase in home defense depending on # of foreign cities captured and owned (allowing for troops to venture further from home without fear) and home defense is similar to Civilization tree's Guardian/Sentinel defenses for cities and wandering around, but can't leave their territory, except maybe for Warfare, it is only a boost to city defenses and not mobile defenses.

Another suggestion would be a "acheivement" bonus for the Sovereign, such as King/Emperor for getting really high in the Civilization tree, which boosts something to do with Civilization, and something similar for getting really high in the other trees, with consequent bonuses.

Magic Tree

For the magic tree, it would have techs that build towards more magic mastery and the Spell of Mastery.  Such things could include techs for decreasing mana cost, increasing effects of % afflictions, ie, burn, freeze, etc, techs for decrease of cast time (if such a thing exists), techs for new, unique spells that don't appear in the tree every game (tech spells as opposed to book spells), techs to increase max mana above essence by % amount, or fixed amount, ie, tech for +10 max mana over essence, techs for magic related bonuses, perhaps Quick-Thinking: casts more spells per turn in tactical combat, Focused: able to cast spells at normal efficiency even when attacked (maybe a penalty for spell casters when attacked?), Smart: can learn x more spells, Connected: can cast spells using Sovereign's mana (could apply to summons too), etc, while for summons, they could get unique abilities/bonuses through techs, such as more health, techs for decreasing mana cost for spells, techs for Sovereign channeling (ability unique to Sovereigns and high level summons, requiring high research in magic tech tree), which allows the Sovereign to cast a spell they know through a summon, using the summon's mana, techs for access to extremely powerful spells, techs for enchanting boosts such as durability, increasing number of despells to despell, techs for increasing despells power, less needed, techs for other things that build the player towards the spell of Mastery, maybe one of the really end ones is Summon Shard, creating a shard of a chosen element, but only one, and requring essence and a long cast time.  Shard related bonuses can be techs, such as increasing effect, (whatever shard's effects are on magic currently), and increasing control (as you need to control the shards to win through Spell of Mastery, not sure of the name), but high level enchantments such as Shard Shielding, which prevents another player from taking the shard from you for x turns, or some other requirement, such as dispelling, or constant mana/essence drain (a sacrifice to hold onto it for a chance of winning). Other high level techs/spells could be summoning something for x number of turns (temporary defense), with their effectiveness (hp/atk/def) tied to the amount of mana (or essence) used, ie, spending 15 mana to use Summon Fire Drakes could result in a 15*(base stats) drake, and even the number could be affected, or even, 15 mana to get a 15*(base stats) drake + x essence for x drakes with those stats.  Different spells, but useful for holding, owning, controlling shards, and other things, but oriented towards spells, magic, and winning through the spell of Mastery (which could be based on the number of spells known too, as well as shards)

Adventuring Tree

For the Adventuring tree, it should be orientated towards winning by adventuring and champions, so have Sovereign/champion specific tech bonuses for units, such as unique champion bonuses such as Efficient/Effective: +% boost to inventory boosts, Daring: +bonus for striking first, Lucky/Keen eyes: +chance for better equips found, and maybe techs for guilds, as people suggested, where you build a guild in a city, using up slots (could be more than normal) and having a champion physically go to the city, train there for x turns, and get the Doctor ability, Merchant ability, etc, whatever the guild is, to get bonuses such as Doctor: +health, and/or +health regen for himself or those around him, or one person (active ability use) for x turns, with cooldown, Merchant, +gildar in a city, - costs for buying equips, +gold for selling equips, and other stuff with unique abilities, which are either passive or active, or more than one ability per guild (and can choose to teach one to a champion).  That or research tech for guilds and part of that tech is the ability to place the guild in a city, higher levels can place guilds anywhere in owned territory, and higher still can place guilds anywhere, as it's adventuring, which should not require a city to play.  Other techs could be advanced dungeon delving, which unleashes your adventuring level of spawn wherever the dungeon was after completing it (or a random chance of it happening), travelling, which allows you to go to other people's territory's dungeons, techs to increase overland movement speed, techs for increased combat speed, and many techs for tactical combat, as possibly players going pure adventuring will spend most of their time doing quests and fighting tactical battles and moving from dungeon to dungeon.  Techs also for new Sovereign specific adventuring bonuses, such as techs for +atk when in his/her party, etc, and new abilities such as Humourous: + morale/max morale, Providing: +extra people allowed in Sovereign's party only, ie, if the max number of people in a party was 20, I think, it can be increased to 20, 30... etc, but only in Sovereign's party.  Techs for increased vision, techs for increased knowledge at inns/quest givers, where doing more quests allows dungeon locations to show on the world map even if you've not been there, but not having vision there, just knowing a dungeon exists there, and techs for increasing guild skills, and such.  Maybe even high level techs for holding more equips, so that any adventuring team going up against armies and sorcerors can stand a chance.  Techs for increasing guild territory, which keeps the land around the guild neutral and prevents cities from being built in a sizable radius around the guild, so that Civilization tree players cannot just take the land and its resources for free.  Furthermore, techs for increasing creature spawn (if you want to train adventurers), but I suppose it can be turned off, or be an ability, such as a unique spell mid to high up in the tree to cast on a dungeon/monster spawning place to allow for more to spawn per unit, and more per turn/several turns.  Other techs can be such as Linking, which gives locations of enemy guild locations, either as targets for you, or just for knowledge, and perhaps one tie in to diplomacy would be to use opponent's guilds to get abilities that you don't have such as if you didn't build Doctor guilds but your ally had one.  Other diplomacy tie ins could be to team up, linking your champions with your allys, and a mechanism could be set up that when breaking an alliance, the treaty lasts for x turns to allow all champions training in an enemy's guild to finish training (or else someone could make an alliance and break it on the last turn before your champion learns the skill).  Also, higher up in the adventuring tree, unique quests could appear, and unique monster spawns, as you are going places people of civilized areas don't dare go.  If they see the typical bears and spiders, you find skeleton warriors and half wolf, half dragons (or something), with unique equips coming from those.

Another idea would be techs which influence other adventurers/champions that are wandering around.  You can get techs like Conversation (for lack of a better name) which let you talk to a wandering champion that you don't have money to hire or don't want to hire, and "send them on quests", to allow them to do the whole killing themselves but unleashing some fierce threat from a dungeon thing.  In the conversation window, you can tell them to go to this or that place (could be enemy territory) and do something there, and increase the chance of unleashing something stronger if they die by more techs, or if they win, getting better equips as a result, and unique ones that spellcasters and civilization and warfare can't build, such as skeletal sword of summoning, won by killing a skeletal commander, which allows to summon 1 skeletal warrior at a time, etc.  Techs can give different commands to wanderers such as one tech being the Quest to Retrieve, which is to get equips, Quest to Attack, to attack something (enemy city, dungeon, monster spawn), Quest to Defend, to defend your city, your guild, even dungeons or something, paying them gildar per turn, while the rest pay gildar or equips I suppose, on completion.  In other words, you don't control them, but you can tell them what to do and if another high level Adventuring Sovereign is there, he can pay them to do something else, depending on the prestige of your guilds, which would increase the cost of the enemy paying someone on one of your quests to do something else, or downright refusing to stop.  If they are killed, diplomacy penalty, maybe even forced repayment, as in automatically getting gildar directly from the enemy who killed your paid adventurer.

Since adventuring was intially supposed to be played without cities, how about everyone having a starting amount of research, and for adventuring, that research can be used to immediately unlock one of the guilds only?  Furthermore, those guilds can be placed anywhere, or on a library, allowing a pure adventuring player to gain research while not having a city.  This could be represented in lore by having guilds studying ancient techniques to further their guild skils, and the more a guild survives (number of turns since it was built, as adventuring is about surviving), the less time it takes to train champions, etc, more prestige, which draws people away from opponent's cities and spawns an occasional low level adventurer at the guild automatically (with the guild's skill already on the champion).

Diplomacy Tree

The last tree is diplomacy, and a way to win would be to ally with everyone.  Lower level techs can be used to increase diplomatic power, so people can causally go in this tree to build up their diplomacy power, but there should be a way to win purely by diplomacy, which is your Sovereign going around making alliances.  A pure diplomacy player would need to build their kingdom/empire (one city), and could then go around making alliances.  They should be able to play without a city though, or have it so that they are not tasked with defending it, such as building it makes it immune to attack from enemies and their borders cannot be shrunk, as part of diplomacy techs.  In order to get research, a pure diplomacy player can get research points for, perhaps, the length of time a treaty lasts, the level of treaty, non-aggression or peace or alliance, etc, diplomatic acts, whatever they are, maybe even acting as an ambassador for different empires/kingdoms.  Perhaps with a starting research amount, can research a unique diplomacy building similar to pure adventuring's guilds that allow it to be placed in neutral territory or anywhere you have a treaty, called an embassy, which generates research points and cannot be attacked unless at war with the player AND the person who's territory it is.  Ie, You make a peace treaty with player A, and player B comes along, but cannot attack the embassy in player A's territory unless at war with both player A AND you.  Someone going pure diplomacy wouldn't have that much in terms of resources and stuff, so they can't afford to lose much.  However, these should be high level diplomacy techs that are harder to gain and not to easy for a casual diplomacy techer to get.

Furthermore, the Capital should gain a bonus, as well as/or immunity from attack, but ONLY the capital.  Attacking the capital of a (high teched) diplomacy player should result in lowered diplomacy with players all around.  However, if someone already has low diplomacy, they might not care, so there should be a safeguard against a player who doesn't care for treaties and wants to wipe everyone out.  Perhaps champions recruited could gain a Peacekeeper ability through tech to allow them to have a bonus when defending an ally, (which might get everyone to want them and make alliances with each other to get Peacekeeper), but the Peacekeeping ability depends on the diplomatic capital.  If it becomes low, if a player begins to use military and attack others, then the ability is disabled, but not lost, and the champions suffer a short penalty to prevent a player from getting Peacekeepers to high levels through the bonus, then turning on everyone.  However, losing diplomatic capital should only occur from attacking someone, as if an enemy break treaties with you, you shouldn't lose your ability to fight.  Peacekeepers and trainable units with the Ambassador ability get bonuses for defending allied / treatied territory, and perhaps for those who want to play that way, get units without your color to defend allied territory without showing who it is, or even attack enemy territory under no determinable color.  Perhaps spies could get the ability to determine who's color it is, as another tech.  Those spies and assassins should be low in the diplomacy tree, for casual techers to get them easily, but the best abilities are left with the high diplomacy tree techer, maybe such as wearing an enemy's color (when spies reveal colors, but high enough counter espionage should get the right color), and unique skills for Peacekeepers (which is an ability given to the high teched diplomacy player's champions) and Ambassadors (which are trainable fighting units by the high teched diplomacy player).  Perhaps trade pacts give a bonus to both sides, giving some bonus to diplomatic capital and prestige to the other player, and resources (materials, gildar, everything they have but research), to you.  Techs could increase this, or even decrease what you give to the others.

What do you think?

Summary:

! The more EVERY player goes up in adventuring, the higher the chance of unleashing a threat by careless adventurers in a normal looking dungeon.

- Civilization Tree:

! New victory path: % Territory controlled

- Techs ideas: (focus on kingdom/empire, increasing its size, win by % territory controlled)

- increasing territory size

- resource generation (not research generation, although territory size increase implies research generation incease)

- techs for kingdom/empire defenses that cannot move outside border, but can move within territory

- techs for increasing city tile number

- techs for economy based champion abilities (woodsman: +materials) (more in original post above)

- techs for increasing prestige

- techs for advanced buildings (to multiply base production values more)

! As cities increase, production decreases overall (mechanic), (and maintenance increases directly), so that optimally, 2 or 3 cities generates the most efficiently, but going higher, worse position because city maintenance and production decrease lowers efficiency, but a high number of cities, ie, ~ 20 (to be balanced), start to give player advantage because of vast amount of territory controlled meaning resources in territory > production loss, but that means keeping the mechanic of controlling resources by territory, but territory is tied to city.

- Warfare Tree:

-Tech ideas: (focus on building troops, win by defeating all players)

- reduce build times

- reduce cost

- increase amount of troops trained at a time

- increase amount of equipment available

- increase stats

- techs for military based champion abilities (courage: strike first, extra damage) (more in original post)

- techs for conquering cities

- techs for increase homeland city defenses (only cities) depending on # of enemy cities captured/controlled

- Magic Tree:

- Tech ideas: (focus on magic, spell of Mastery)

- decreasing mana cost

- increasing % of afflictions (ie, freeze, burn)

- decrease cast time

- unique spells (not in books)

- techs to increase max mana a fixed number above essence (ie, max mana = 10 + essence)

- techs for magic based champion abilities (Quick-Thinking: cast more spells in tactical combat per turn) (more in original post)

! high level tech: Channelling, allows Sovereign to cast Sovereign spell through a high level summon using summon's mana

! high level tech: Summon Shard/Shield Shard, for the purpose of holding shards or getting one for the spell of Mastery), could cost essence, essence/turn, mana + mana/turn

! high level tech: Summon X (ie, Fire Drakes), with base stats = (mana used) x (base stats) and # of X = essence cost, where Soveriegn can pick amount of mana used and essence used, for temporary defense, lasts for Y turns (maybe depending on essence or mana, or a drain of mana/turn, can be cast to defend anywhere, especially shards)

Adventuring Tree:

! Pure adventurer Sovereigns build guilds on libraries to get research

! Guilds gain prestige the longer they survive, pull people from other cities and occasionally turn them into champions

! Guilds can train champions with a unique ability, more gained through teching up

! Can pick one guild at start

! Can give quests after teching high enough (Defend, Attack, Retrieve (equips))

! techs for adventuring based champion abilities (Doctor: + max health or regen or heal one person (with cooldown)) (more in original post)

- Tech ideas: (focus on adventuring, dungeon delving, Master Quest)

- reduce cost for recruiting

- techs for increasing monster respawn

- techs for % chance of unleashing ferocious monsters after leaving a dungeon

- techs for going to other people's dungeons

- techs for increased overland movement

- techs for increased combat speed

- techs for tactical combat skills

- techs for Sovereign specific combat skills or others, and Sovereign abilities

- techs to increase Sovereign party size

- techs for knowledge of dungeon locations

! unique monsters to battle, unique equips

Diplomacy Tree:

Tech ideas: (focus on alliances, ally with everyone victory)

! need Kingdom/Empire to use some diplomatic skills (at least one city)

- can build embassies in territories with treaties which cannot be attacked unless attacker at war with BOTH you and the person who owns the territory, embassies can be built on libraries for research

- can get Peacekeeper ability to champions and Ambassador ability to trained units for defending allies and yourself

- lower techs give spies and assassins and such so that casual diplomacy techers can get them

- maybe other techs for diplomacy based champion abilities

- maybe tech for capital immunity from attack based on diplomatic points