[douglas]

IMO there should be a penalty for concentrating too much on a single tech field. This would make simultaneously researching several tech areas with various percentages of research allocated a sensible approach. Make sure click-and-drag works reasonably well, taking points away from other areas (from highest spending fields first) as necessary to meet the current slider's cost, and add locks that can be enabled on each slider to prevent points being taken from it, and I think we'd have a pretty good system. Just make sure there's an undo feature so a single misclick won't require readjusting all the sliders you're interested in because they all got dropped to 0 when you dragged one to 100.