[Suggestion] Remove the Civilization tech tree
I'm very likely to get flak for this from our builder-oriented players, but hear me out for a second.
What exactly is the purpose of the civilization tech tree? Asuming that you max out the tree, what benefit do you gain from doing so? Faster research of the other trees? You can't exactly win via alliance with no standing army, nor can you front an army using camps as they are limited in the number you can build. Unless the camp building limit is removed this tree is nothing more than a crutch to bypass the rediculous research times.
Now don't get me wrong, I am not proposing a removal of buildings and technology that improve empire management. That part is both fun and required to prevent technology from spiraling out of control at the begining of the game. What I am proposing is to instead link the appropriate techs/buildings to their respective trees. That is to say the magic tree should link up with diplomatic capital, camps and research buildings. The warefare tree should link up with production, food and gildar.
You are certainly free to decide to dip into either one of these and the decision behind which of the various techs within each tree you choose still remains, the difference is that you aren't specifically researching technology to research technology to research technology...
The secondary issue with this is that long term planning with the civilization tree can span 100 turns or more. That is a little too long. A 20 or even 40 turn decision to pick up a military tech is more reasonably within a human's ability to plan. I'm prepared to lay out a much wider (and needed) magic technology tree to get this started, but I thought I would get some feedback first.
Am I missing something? There doesn't seem to be any reason to max out this tree other than to help max out the other trees.