[Reay]

The last megagame was reasonably balanced with hard research. It is a large game so people can go up the research tree pretty quickly. Normal research is unbalanced for a megagame IMHO.

I survived with Machaka against Helheim because I could get Flaming Arrows before attacking. Without them I would probably have been crushed by the dual blessed Helherdlings. So very hard research is probably also unbalanced.

Hard research by mid game was starting to get unbalanced with several nations shooting up the tree. However many of these nations died out later on and I eventually caught up.

So I support Xietor in using standard hard research.