Is there a way to lock research paths?

[Olive]

Yes, a button to lock / unlock a path, like in Master of Magic for Mana/Research/Skill if I remember well, would be great.

And the + / - should add / substract points 1 by 1, it's always frustrating to spend time trying to adjust precisely research, and not succeeding at it.

Something more, when choosing a school to display the list of spells, the spells are sorted by levels. Near of the level, it would be nice to have the research points needed to reach it.

Ex :

Alteration 1 : OK.
...
...
... List of spells
...
...

Alteration 2 : OK.
...
...
... List of spells
...
...

Alteration 3 : 43 remaining.
...
...
... List of spells
...
...

Alteration 4 : 203 remaining.
...
...
... List of spells
...
...

etc...

OK, it's actually possible to calculate it if needed, but it would be more comfortable to have it displayed.

[DanielM]

I agree that locking research paths is a must.

Another possiblity I have seen in other games:

The bars can be used as weights, i.e. each bar can take any value between 0 and 100 independently from the others. The amount of points allocated to each path is then determined by (weight for this path)/(total sum of weights)*(number of points available).

Though that would probably be more difficult to implement than simple locking.

[llamabeast]

Actually, I do definitely agree that complete fine-tuning is sometimes impossible. I just give up, and accept wasting 2 or 3 research points, which I guess is a bit poor really. Also the + and - keys seem a bit erratic to me, I don't know if I'm being somehow inept.