@ Paradoxical: thanx for my first karma point   I appreciate it.

Well to speak frankly I did try to justify the system with a similar reasoning. I did state in my original post that I can accept the odd lair being "dug up", or re-found or something.

But... it takes a damn lot of "imaginative effort" to explain everything this way. I can't accept to be able to SAFELY journey through the land in the first part of the game, when I know that those same lands are populated by hordes of ravaging monsters, including dragons.  

Monsters that my scholars conveniently "make appear" at level 3, then at level 4, then 5, then 6 and so on!

This is 4th wall breaking, if you're into movies-theater metaphors.

And how do you explain champions, by the way? Do scholars find documents that describe how to find level 5 heroes roaming aimlessly, then a document explaining how to find level 6 hero and so on? Come on, let's be real. It's a just a poor design choice.

And even if I could accept such a background (I cannot... it really feels wrong to me), the tech tree could still use some interdependencies. That's how research works, really. No progress can be made, in ANY field, without the help of discoveries in OTHER fields. This makes the tree completely lifeless and mechanical, to me.

Oh. Maybe I did purchase the wrong game, after all.   Many games of the past got this aspect perfectly: I am surprised there's need to argue about it at all...

Wierd, I personally LOVE the tech tree in Elemental

I don't think that's weird. Armor and weapons progress together imo. Make big sword, make armor to not get hurt by big sword, make bigger sword to hurt armor, etc

I mean it makes a bit more sense in an escalation between two groups, but it still makes sense to me if one group were to find an new tech then find something to defend it in case enemy got it,

Rather than 5 separate trees, I would have rather seen each faction get it's own single tree.

Precisely. In Civ4, resources didn't just mysteriously appear at all. They were there the whole time, you just couldn't see them. Whereas in Elemental, resources literally just appear out of thin air. You only get one extra resource, and it always spawns right next to your city. How does that make even the slightest sense. Surely if I've discovered a new way of tapping an existing resource then I would put this into practise all over the map, not just in one of my dozens of cities. Or if I've learned to make pacts with spiders, surely there is more than one spider web in the entire world? It's a massive failure of suspension of disbelief.

Don't forget, the early marketing made a big deal of how you'd have to go out and make pacts with the various creatures you could recruit, and there'd be no guarantee that you'd get the same ones each time, so each game would be different. Well, no, actually it looks like every game is exactly the same, and you can make these pacts without ever leaving the safety of your city, because the spiders come to you.

As for the techtree, it's flat and uninspiring. I mean, don't get me wrong, in its current state it works just fine. It's not a bad system, per se. But it could be so much more, and the system the OP describes would accomplish exactly that.

As for you folks who are trying to rationalise an identifiable problem in game mechanics with the explanation of "well you don't understand the fluff properly", you really need to stop. Bad mechanics can never be fixed by any amount of fluff. It's a simple fact of game design, and railing against the facts (even as verbosely and eloquently as you have) isn't going to accomplish anything.

I really like the tech trees. Especially that it is somewhat randomized.

Keep in mind I don't have the game yet, I'm one of those sitting on the fence.

- I think a lot of technologies are just +5% or +20% increases of something. They rarely offer something genuinely new, especially a new option. Is this correct ?

- I have no problems accepting that lairs are accessible only after certain tech is researched. It's about ancient lore, right ? It requires studies ? Lairs might require knowing a secret entrance or a ritual of passage. What I would like to have is an ability to see lairs even if they can't be entered yet. Inaccessible ones could be displayed as sketches, especially on cloth map. The rest has been looted already. Reasons:  so I can plan a bit better, also in multiplayer games. In MP i might want to occupy an area even if I can't benefit from it. To deny others an advantage. (Dog in the manger).

Some of the bad mechanics in this game lie more in the STRUCTURE of the research tree rather than the functionality.  People are arguing against a misnomer ... TECHS or technology.  Researching Technology implies new invention and mechanical discoveries.  The Devs really messed up here because part of the research tree IS about inventing or rediscovering technology, BUT some of the 'techs' have nothing to do with technology and more to do with Lore and Information. 

When you research the adventuring branch in particular you are not INVENTING gold mines, nor are you inventing champions or monsters(frankenstein might disagree about the monsters), instead you are aquiring information about locations.  When you have these locations the 'stuff' appears on the map.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with this mechanic.  It's all in the CONTEXT or the THEME of the game ... that mechanic is designed around the idea or FLUFF of the world if you will.  It's actually an excellent mechanic, brilliant even because it supports the background story of the game quite well. 

Is it perfect?  No, but it's a great idea and I commend the devs for coming up with it.  It would be nice if there were MORE variety in the minor goodies as well as UNIQUE dungeons and structures that only appeared in one location rather than 3 or 5.  Maybe there are unique things I just havent discovered them yet. 

Seems like some people just can't get over a gold mine popping up next to their city that wasnt there before ...  calling it a bad mechanic while at the same time ignoring the IMPLIED scale of the maps and the back story that fully explains why you didnt know it was there in the first place.  It's definitely not the traditional method of resource discovery and I can see why people have a problem with that.  The game contains everything you need to figure all this out, if you take the time to look. 

If I were the devs however, I think I'd break the Lore aspects of the research tree out into their own seperate branch and maybe work on the descriptions of the individual lore discoveries to help clarify what they actually do for your Soverign. 

Despite the fact their appearance is explained as being let loose due to your scholars meddling in things man was not meant to know?

I assume they go out and pick up rumours of who the most successful dungeon wanderers happen to be and how they may be contacted. Which is the kind of thing you'd be doing if say you were a talent scout for a sports team in the days before sport was broadcast on TV or radio.

^ This, I'd assumed they'd be refining their techniques, creating information networks, sending out scouts, learning what to look for, ect.

  For You!

This is a strategy game, not a simulation.  If you want realism and things that make sense, then walk outside your front door, although it is debatable that you'll find it there.

If you can't bridge the gap using your imagination, then I apologize for the short-sightedness.  Heroes (for recruiting) do not have to "magically appear out of thin air."  They are wandering the lands.  Your researchers can make new contacts.  These heroes could make themselves known when they learn that your scholars are advancing their researches.  There are infinite possibilities.  "Popping out of thin air" breaking realism is a frail argument to use in a fantasy turn based strategy game.  It is akin to arguing that your sovereign would not have to click "End Turn" if it were real life and not a game.  Things are happening all the time during and in between turns.  Time does not stop, even if it does in the game world.  These things appearing "out of nowhere" is a representation of that.

The same would hold true for monsters, quest sites, treasures, etc.

To continue to return back to the same point without considering the possibilites that have been posted, or using your own imagination to fill in the gaps, is coming very close to trolling.  This is not a design flaw.  It is a perception flaw.  Namely, your perception.  It barely constitutes as an opinion, as if you are making things up to try to invalidate the game.

Rename "adventuring" to something like "world knowledge". Then, you can explain that some people at your cities research ancient books and legends talking about those new papers (like if we wanted to search for Atlantis for example). Then... when researchers manage to put together all the information, the location to those ancient places is revealed "appearing" in the map. Or to soy more properly, your kingdom puts those places in the map because it has just relearned about its existence.

Need a branch for breeding to allow your wife to have more children, to chose the sexe, to educate them, to stay quietly in her city etc ...