How much of the tech web do you get to finish?

[RaidandTrade]

Not a lot of time to go into this hardcore yet - still feeling my way around. Question I had around the tech side of things is whether you will actually finish the tech web like the Civ V tree or whether you'll only realistically do a portion of it and therefore need to select carefully. I suspect and hope it's the latter.

The next question is roughly how much of it you'll complete? My guess is a little over a third if the affinity "balance" concept is preserved but would be interested to hear peoples' experiences.

 

[ggmoyang]

In my first game, I researched 52 techs.
Had Purity level 18 and won promised land.

After that, I'm just messing around.

 

[Ryoga]

Completing the tech web is absolutely far from being necessary to win. While in Civ V you need to get at least a 85-90% to win anything that isn't a rush domination (and almost 100% for science victory) in Civ BE you can get away with 65% or even less.

More techs than that do not give you stronger units (you'll reach max a lot earlier) and you'll have enough for your affinity victory already. All that you can get are more buildings and more affinity perks, but that just becomes overkill.

You can still push that "one more turn" button after you win and then finish the tech tree for fun. You'll still get the achievement.

 

[Lanth]

Definitely don't need to get all the techs, and I'd say it's designed to encourage you not to - to choose which path you want to go down means you're giving up other options you could have had.

The branch techs are much cheaper than the leaf techs, and many of the mid-late leaf techs give you affinity points + affinity unit, or a minor improvement to some aspect of your empire. So if you're focussing on Harmony, there's no reason to get many of the branch techs that lead to Purity/Supremacy-only leaf techs, unless you particularly want to get any buildings or bonuses attached to those techs and you don't mind delaying your victory in order to get them.

Another way to characterise it (not having played CiV), is that in Civ4 in 'general' play most techs would take 8-9 turns, maybe out to 15-16 to research, and the benefits of researching anything in the 20+ range would be easily outweighed by back-filling many of the cheap techs you've missed. In BE in the early-mid-game it doesn't seem uncommon to want to research 2 or 3 techs in a row that initially take 20+ turns each, while skipping other techs that might only take 7-8 turns because they're just not useful for your ultimate goal (for example, you would then have to spend another 15 turns researching the leaf tech to get the building/bonus you wanted).