Liquid Research and a Lock out button

[lch]

Originally Posted by vfb

Yes it does make sense: when you only need to go up one level in that 2nd path, and your total research is higher than the incremental research needed to get that one level. It happens all the time to me, especially if I concentrate on just a couple paths for the early game.

That's a border case, but usually it can only be experienced when you have an enormous amount of RP from lots of mages and have neglected some schools before. In that case, it usually doesn't matter. But while it isn't easy, it's still possible to split up the RP well enough so that you can break the next level in multiple schools at the same time. It does require a little bit of fiddling around, and sometimes it involves spending more points into a school than you need and reducing them later on again, or even temporarily putting points into a school that you don't plan to research in the end. It feels like playing Towers of Hanoi or the Can't Stop game. We could make a competition out of it, who is able to spend the points the closest to the optimum? I'm willing to bet that you can get it up to +/- 2 RP with more than two schools at the same time, that's what I usually got out of it in MP gaming.

Being able to lock research for a school in the GUI would make all this fiddling around with the markers unnecessary, yes. But the suggestion isn't new and thus I have my doubts if it's going to get implemented.