Anyone else taking issue with the number of points needed to research spells/techs?

You are over simplifying things a bit...  Elemental uses some sort of high-water system.  The cost of everything declines compared to your highest tech researched.  As such, you can drive down one tech tree a few levels and the other techs will be cheaper to learn.  I am not sure if it is more efficient to do this, but knocking out fast techs generally comes from trees that you have neglected.

Anyhow, why being advanced in spell research makes domination research easier is a bit of question...

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I am not sure that is how it works. As far as I can tell, it is much simpler:

Assuming level 1 of any tech tree cost X amount. Then

Level 2 costs 2x

Level 3 costs 3x

Level 4 costs 4x

Etc.

The other tech that is behind just seems faster in comparison. The problem here is not that research cost doesn't increase, the problem is that it increases linearly, where the research points you have available increases super-linear, often almost exponentially. This means that sooner or later research is going to go really really fast.

This is what I mean.  I think that 1st level tech is fine, 1st level spells should be cheaper to research, but that higher level costs should be on an increasing curve, not linear.  Say Level 2 is 3x, Level 3 is 6x, level 4 is 10x, and Level 5 is 15x, or some similar progression.

No.

It feels like research is balanced toward the mid-late game instead of early on. It feels wonky, to me at least, because I get brought up short by bugs and other stuff when I only have two cities, and that's the farthest I make it in most of these beta builds. When you have 4 cities and one is completely specialized to research, with a couple nodes to help it out, I'm pretty sure it balances out to normalcy. In the beginning though research is tediously slow.

No issues here.

Yes.

8 Turns?? You clearly don't have the game on Epic.

Put the setting to Epic and play the game the way its meent to be! No more units becoming out dated before you have even fished building them!!

Just so you all know, the variables to modify the linear and nonlinear components of research cost increases are in the ElementalDefs.xml file. Customizing research cost increases is trivial.

I DON'T.....NUFF SAID! But I'll add some more anyways. Everything needs to sloooooooooow down in building up the empires. Games should take a longgggggggggggg time to finish not 5 minutes. So, keep it at 25 turns as that feels right to me.

I think you are right. If the research production of the player increases at the same rate as the technology it should take roughly 10 turns to research a technology, as in most other games, but only if the technologies are balanced and not overpowered (late game armor compared to early game weapons or spells like Curgens Inferno).

I too feel research is too slow to begin with, and too fast later. The real pain is research level 2 which feel much more expensive than level 1. Once you get higher in levels the difference between being at level 9 or being at level 13 doesn't feel that big.

I think the main issue is you'll finish all spells in 1/4th of the time it takes to finish all the research. I think they're simply trying to balance out the time on both these things so that it makes for "fun" gameplay.

I think this will improve as they add more spells, that means they can reduce the research time on spells.

In my opinion, a working fix that would work with the current version of the game would be to reduce the time it takes to research spells, but increase the time it takes to research a new spell level ten-fold.

Never tried it---is that a faster or slower rate?

No, I think it is fine the way it is.

I don't know if you had a gold mine or two, but try to build all of those tech and arcane research buildingd while trying to keep and army and equip your sov/champs without a gold mine. 

I always seem to run into money problems, and there is a balance, you can load up on tech, and sacrifice troops and equip for sov/champs or vice versa.

I think the balance is fine.  For me anyway, it seems about level 5-8 or so, it starts to take me 15-25 turns for a tech.  I also usually wait though a bit on the diplomacy after caravans and the adventure techs, trying to get housing up, food up, money up while weapons as well.

I think it is a bit lame that it is currently pretty easy to max all the tech trees, aside from the never ending techs (+10% x).  Instead of increasing the amount of points per research, i would like to see a much wider range of techs.  Make all the trees about twice the current length so that the very highest tech take a very long time (and dominate) but must be taken at the expense of having a shot of reaching the others in a typical game.

Yeah, I have the 'fast games' setting.  That way, I can figure out the various elements in the game sooner.  Playtesting and all that...

Plus, even at 'fast', the game still takes a while...

personally i'm with the people who think it's too slow at the beginning. so much in this game is locked away until you have the right techs, the whole game to me feels like one giant early game followed by a short and anti-climactic late game. you need to be about 40 techs in (across the board) before you can make any military units that aren't just naff units to scare away the monsters.

so i do think it needs to be faster, although i'd also prefer it if half this stuff didn't have to be researched anway (stuff like basic equipment, utilising your shards, training groups). whether the economy would be developed enough to support that stuff by then is another matter however.

A little off topic, but I think it would be absolutely cool to have a GalCivII style race creation interface!

For those who have never seen that.  You get race creation points (like we have now), but you spend some of those points on tech trees, not just 'cool abilities'.  So, for example, if you wanted to have 'Shard Harvesting', you'd just pay some points and get that tech.  And, if you wanted multiple techs down the same tree, you could do so, but they cost more as you worked down the tree.

Oh, and you could select multiple levels for the bonuses for more points (say +2 to speed instead of +1, +15% to tech instead of +10%, etc).

There were a few other things (defensive bonus for your units, better sight range, etc.).  We have a few now, but there were a LOT of options in GalCivII!  Thanks for reminding me about that guys, now I want those plethora of choices here!

Maybe we'll see that in an expansion...

3-4 times slower, its fantastic!

I got sick of it on fast, you can chose where to take advantage and steam roll the AI..