God-Emperor
Deity
Planetary Exploration is the first empty dead-end tech I could find, refreshing my memory now. I believe there are more.
... oh, while I'm here; the beaker value of Future Tech 1, I suspect, reflects its position at the end of a larger tech tree.
Ah. Planetary Exploration is a Modern era tech and I didn't really look at those very closely. I'm not sure why some of the later techs, like the Jupiter exploration or asteroid probe, do not require it. In C2C v27 it is a prereq for a Galactic era tech (Planet Colonization), but that entire era is gone so it leads nowhere in R2R. I think I need to have the tech actually do something. If nothing else, something like +2 research for the radio telescope building would be useful. There might be some other benefit it could give, or a more suitable building to give it to, but nothing is coming to mind right now.
OK, I just put that in: +2 research for the radio telescope building at Planetary Exploration. It will be in the next release. I might also make it an additional prereq for the asteroid probe tech, but have not decided yet.
As for Future Tech, you are right. I did not adjust the cost. It should be reduced by a large amount. Its current cost, as listed in the XML, is 2904000. The next most expensive is only 19400. So I'm thinking it should be reduced to something like 25000. (I just did so in my current version so it will make it into the next release.)
While I was looking at Planetary Exploration I discovered that its 3 text keys in ATOM_CIV4GameText.xml are all in there twice, so the duplicates have been removed. (This might shave a microsecond or two off of the load time...)
Thanks for your comments! I have never actually gotten past the Industrial era playing R2R (or C2C), so I am not really very familiar with the things after that. I guess I'm going to have to get one of my on-going games at Epic speed past the Industrial era - most of my games have been on Marathon and I'm included towards that or Snail when playing for fun, but for testing purposes I have started a couple of on different map sizes at Epic.