[Warlord Adamus]

Not saying it wouldn't have been an interesting addition, but i'll just play devils advocate for a minute..

"I think right now, you have a problem in which an advanced tech empire runs out of decent weapons to research about 70 turns into the game..."

This is entirely dependant on what path your empire chooses. Iv'e probably played hundreds of games and Iv'e never run out of weapons research by turn 70. If you're doing that then your empire is most likely being unattended in other areas.

"Right now, at some point, research goes completely away as a part of the game. "

Not really. The fruits of that research are there until the game ends.

"nmoppa, the problem never came up that much for me in MOO/MOO2 because I always wrapped up the game before it became much of a consideration. "

Most could say this about SE4..

"A final idea would be to introduce the idea of regression. "

Very interesting in theory, but what in practice ? Can you imagine being locked in a Multi-player battle and all of the sudden your tech base randomly drops to the stone age ? That wouldn't be fair. Or in single when an AI player is afflicted with the same problem. A human player would destroy that player before he could ever recover.

"Once you run out of stuff that you *want* to research or once you have *actually* researched everything, then you just have tons and tons of facilities lying around useless. "

This is why there is now a "scrap facility type" button. Not a perfect solution I know, but all of the sudden the build space your empire occupies is doubled. While you won't research a Superdreadnought, you can now build a whole lot more of them with the facility space freed up. I guess it's a glass is half empty vs. half full kinda thing.