It's funny you should mention redoing research. Just yesterday I was watching the teaser trailer again and I saw a glimpse of the original iteration of the research screen and I thought "Hey, that looks cooler then the system we have now". At least it looked like it gave the player more choice. Of course it only "looked" that way. The difference was you picked one thing at a time instead of picking a group then picking something out of that group. It research feel like it took longer, which I thought was a good thing. The last thing I want to say at this point is to take a step backwards in design, but it might be worth giving that system another look at. I also had an interesting idea. I'll go ahead and put it here instead of the ideas section since it's relevant now.
Research Specialization:
Basis for Idea: Technological achievement in anything can be made if enough resources are spent.
Game-Play Affect: Chose your research Exactly, being guaranteed to get whatever it is you want, but with a MUCH HIGHER cost. Especially if what you're going after is hard to get or rare research.
In real life, if you throw enough money at a problem it will go away or you can get past it, the only real factors being the time taken and the money spent. Real life case in point, a mission to mars. It isn't so much that we don't have the technology to do it, we do, it's just that in today's economy no government is willing to spend the massive amounts of money it would take to do it.
Use in Game-Play: Choose research category as normal. Then decide to "Specialize Research" and pick Exactly what research you want to work towards. The cost of that research would Quadruple in Cost at the very least, but after the proper amount of time is spent and the proper amount of resources are spent, you'd unlock the research you're going after. With such huge costs players would be very hesitant to use this, but, it could also be used in a last ditch effort to gain a certain tech that could save an empire/kingdom during a loosing war. Being used by a smaller kingdom or a kingdom with limited resources it would practically (if not actually) bankrupt them. Being used by a large empire/kingdom it would have enormous costs and slow down production of units, income of money and other resources, and tie up all research facilities or maybe even you could need to keep the sovereign in the city doing research to be able to "specialize" research. You could also make "Research Specialization" a ability or skill that only "Researchers" or "Scholars" have access to at higher levels. This would give some of those more "useless" heroes a use at mid to late game.
It might be something to keep in mind while redoing the research system and could add a lot of strategic value to the research mechanics overall, but especially mid to late game when getting those harder technologies or researching those really powerful spells really matters. If anything just keep the idea on the back burner until after launch and think about implementation then.
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(because i always wondered how people can find the current system fun in any way)
