(09-19-2018, 04:25 PM)Haxus Wrote: I disagree that a player should know that developing a patent for plastic today could lead to the discovery of warp drives down the road.
Sorry, I guess you haven't played Minecraft. The achievement view in Minecraft have the neat little feature of only showing the immediately next achievements. And looking at Minecraft news, maybe it has changed since last I played it.
The technology tree view could be made to hide far off technology, and only show the next level or two in the tree. For example it might show that after rocket-drive you can research the gravity-drive if you also research Eludium, but it won't say that after the gravity-drive you can research the warp-drive. It would however be nice if it showed that it isn't a dead-end branch, just show a "?" for all things after that are more than one level down the tree. Technology in a branch can be completely hidden until you have at least one prerequisite's prerequisite researched.
Of course there are a lot of patents that have no prerequisites right now.
Hiding far off technology on the view/list is just useful for some new players, so they a smaller list of things that are important and not be confused about a long list. But if everything is hidden they might be confused about why they can't research gravity-drives, because they don't know they need to research rocket-drive first.