Hello there.
I was lurking on the forum long enough, so it's time to finally reveal myself.
And I do this because in the discussion on a page back, an early era problems showed up, I wasn't sure if my ideas are worthy of a new thread.
I can't say much about balancing issues, but as I read about beelining to Writing, I come up with this: what if we could take early game 'technology' as a bit more general 'development'? That is, if there would be not only actual techs in there, but also concepts-turned-techs, like Prestige and Fame (which would allow the Civ to go from minor to normal, instead of Writing) or even stuff like Mercy or Justice (not exactly those, if necessary, but I think you get this). If we add a bunch of those, and spread whatever buildings/units/etc. techs give now to bigger number of them, it should help with beelining. It would require some more balancing for sure, but maybe keeping the sum of all tech costs constant would be enough for starters. Also some of the concept-techs could open the way to certain unit promotions (existing or new ones), or lead to much later techs. For example, Monotheism could require Justice. I'm making this up without looking at the tech tree, so forgive me if I mess real bad.
Some similar techs are already in place in more modern days, like Nationalism and some such - maybe we could think about that?
Thanks for listening to me.
While I have really little time on my hands right now (it's going to be a crazy year) and thus I probably won't be able to help with programming or similar things, I'm always happy to conduct some research and come up with new ideas, most of which would be probably crazy to useless, but some might benefit us all.
