UPgrading technology and research in RTS games

[Chroelle]

Well I always enjoyed playing RTS games, but only historical ones, like the AOE series before they turned mythological...
I very much enjoyed playing Cossacks when that appeared as the level of research was a wide spread tree with lots of things to research and finelly tune to your enjoyment.
My big question lies in this:
Have you ever heard of a game where you could keep on researching/upgrading your sciences/weapons/tools through hundreds of upgrades, because it really does annoy me that the closest thing I got to this is the Future Tech in Civ...

I enjoy games where I get a lot of things for my money and don't end up stockpiling ressources because I don't have anything else to use them on...

Let me know if you ever tripped over a real gem of a RTS game, which kept you playing the same level for hours on end...

[Eric]

I think all these games have an end to the tech tree somewhere, although many games tackle this problem in different ways.

The CIV series made every 'Future Tech' add more points to your score.

Master of Orion did max out at level 99 for all techs - but up to this point, the improvements would keep reducing the size of ship equipment which was useful for craming that last Death Ray into a ship. You can never have enough Death Rays.

[Parvini]

Hmmmm.... big tech trees... let me think...

I remember Galactic Civilizations having quite a big one:

http://webpages.charter.net/trevorpowdrell/techtree.pdf

Well, maybe not.

I've done a bit of a search and it seems that Total Annihilation is reknowned for having the biggest tech tree of any RTS - incidentally, those who've played it tend to claim it is the "best RTS of all time", anyone played it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Annihilation

http://www.fileuniverse.com/Total_Annih ... index.html

http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/t ... nihilation