[Jeb]

On the other hand, the "delayed effect of efforts" is one of the things that causes "just one more turn" syndrome. First you play another turn so you can research that dandy new tech. Then you play a few more turns waiting for a ship incorporating the new gizmo to be built. Then you play some more so you can see it in action. By that time, you're on the verge of a new breakthrough, and you're hooked for another couple of hours. If everything improved gradually and incrementally with no need for upgrades or new ship designs or anything, new tech would be a lot less fun.

While I'm being a contrarian, I might as well add that I'm not crazy about a more complicated research system. If there is still some sort of tree but players just aren't given information about what leads to what and how much it costs, this will have a couple of bad effects. 1) Some players will inevitably figure out the whole tree, and then have a massive advantage over those who are just guessing. 2) As a side effect of (1), Boards like this one will be deluged with newbie (and not so newbie) questions about the tech tree.

The other proposal on the table is to make research very random, so even knowing as much as you can about the tech tree still won't allow you predict what you'll discover or when. This is more realistic, but could really unbalance the game. Imagine in a PBEM game where the research subroutine generates some bad numbers and you wind up with fighters, planet improvement, radioactives extraction, and chemistry 3 while your opponent gets meat-and-potatoes techs like propulsion, shields, and energy pulse weapons.

All that said, I do like the idea of not everyone having the same tech. The MOO2 system of not allowing everyone to research every tech (except for those weenie Psilons) was fun, although could also lead to tedium if you tried to keep a "pet" enemy empire around in hopes of stealing all the techs you can't research yourself. So to really get this to work, some techs should just be mutually incompatible. I have no idea about how that shoudl work, though.