Overall the pace of technology seems far too slow. After running a game for several hundred turns, and touting a sprawling empire, many of the higher level technologies still take over 500 turns. In the event I was supposed to able to research multiples of these that would indicate the game would play on for several thousand turns (?!?!??!?!) before maxxing out the tech tree. I presume the idea of 'refinery' techs was meant to prevent unit stagnation.. but I don't think any sane person would be able to play the game for that long.

Couple this with the fact that you can much much more easily level and outfit your champions (or even regular units) and technology takes a sad second seat to the game. On that thought.. perhaps hero level (soft caps) could be tied to technologies..

In any case, from all of this there are a few techs that really stand out as requiring tweaking:

Warcolleges- The tech cost for this is disproportionately high considering to gain the xp benefit of the building it must be built -early- in the game. (The rediculously slow rate of xp gain is an aside). Removal of the emnity portion of this building and placing it somewhere else along the tech tree or perhaps swapping the level benefits of command posts, would make more sense, than to attach such a high cost to an over time xp gain effect.

Fortresses- The tech cost for this is also disproportionately high as defensive buildings are in response to an attack and should require fewer resources to enable as there is little gain from defending.

Advanced Archery- The tech cost for this is disproportionately low!! I understand the lower cost for bows and longbows as neither of those weapons scale with strength and will quickly be outdone by melee equipment, but the yew bow ignores a big portion of armor and being able to produce 5-7 unit stacks of yew bowmen is ludicrously powerful compared to the technology cost of the other available options.

Arcane Mastery- This has to do with the specific benefit of the tech, which is to provide a very poorly implemented building. It seems odd that the game encourages building directly on top of (or constructing buildings in a line towards) mana nodes. Especially when the idea of outposts being capable of gathering resources for you was introduced. The building should instead provide 1 additional mana per shard produced by that city and can only be built by cities producing shards. Or some other alternative that doesn't require specifically spacing out your cities on top of mana shards.