For some reason, I am reminded of that classic Nielson study where they found that if they offered $5 for a survey response, they would get none, whereas if they offered only $1, they would get a lot of responses.

Not same, I know... but perceived value concept is definitely relevant.

As is concept of investment, and it's relation to endorsement (increased probability of endorsement if you can get someone to make commitment and investment).

Just think... with SaaS, you could have lots of little endorsers all running around for a one year period, pushing the "crack" on their friends.

"Cummon man, just $2 and you can have some too."

Obviously, the game needs to continue developing and pushing the envelope... quality needs to be there to make this happen as planned... but that's the whole point.

(It. Costs. Money.)

People only push crack because they get addicted to it.  It's not the sales method that makes money, it's the game.

Sales method and marketing tactics matter quite a bit too.

And perhaps you didn't notice my comment about game quality?

I really like the idea of a research tree.  It's something we have, extensively, considered. We have been worried that the pacing of Ashes is too fast for people to be comfortable with a tedch tree.

The tech tree approach in SupCom2 was almost universally disliked. I think you can flesh out he current upgrades and add a fair amount of depth that way.

...

Are gamers really that lazy now?  We don't have manual unit abilities, we have control groups that slide across the map at a snails pace, and all of our production is simplified with repeatable queues and way points.  If people really can't handle a research tree more complicated than half a dozen repeating percent upgrades in a game this slow, then I'll just go play a Total War game instead.  Or FE:LH, if you guys ever fix the annoying bugs in it that drive me batty every time I go to play it...  I really don't enjoy having to constantly replace upgraded outposts because their upgrades reverse...

Being able to handle something and liking something are two completely different things.

I think the 'why' is an important bit of context, though.  I wasn't impressed with several other things about SupCom 2 so I wasn't around for whatever forum debacle that might have been through - if it's true that people hated that part of the game, was it because 'research trees are bad and hard to manage'?  Or was it because it shoehorned you into using a specific set of boosted units while potentially leaving you disproportionately vulnerable to attacks (like nukes and artillery) from the trees you didn't follow?  Or was it because the mechanic was a significant change from the relative freedom and variety that a player grew used to expecting from the game's predecessor?

Since I started looking at this forum, I find myself showing unhealthy amounts of agreement with psychoak.  I get that the absolutely glacial pacing of nearly everything that happens in this game has successfully been spun as 'moar strategy!' but I also find it hard to believe that a little more variety in the research paths would be what tips the game into the unplayable micromanagement abyss.

But that's me.  TL:DR, I would also be all right with a reasonably well balanced (that part is important and one thing I do think SupCom 2 suffered from) tech tree or at least something that would allow for some degree of specialization in longer games.

That is terribly unhealthy.

I've got a fairly diverse interest in RTS games, Warlords: Battlecry, Supreme Commander, Kohan, Homeworld, and Sins of a Solar Empire being my all time favorites.  Research isn't even in all of them, it's by no means a necessity for a successful, entertaining game, but it's far from something that makes a game less good.

SupCom2 may have been a drag in general, but I seriously doubt it was because it had a research tree, and probably more because of what kind of tree it was.  One of the traditional methods of doing research in RTS games has been to tie research to production factors and make it cost money.  Abstracting it away to complex trees you have to slowly work your way up irrespective of what infastructure you've developed is not the most practical mechanism.  Sins went a different route, with generic stat upgrades in lines, and specific improvements linked to the unlocks to the objects they were boosting.  Having what you can produce, and what you can improve completely disconnected like was done in SupCom2 gained the predictable result of people not being happy with it.  For a game like Ashes, or SupCom2, where production is from general structures and doesn't require specific unlocks either in research or construction form, research should be similarly open.

i liked the sup com 2 upgrades, it was sup com 2 in general that was disliked i think.

I do feel like the quanta hasn't been fully realized yet.

1.  The quanta building needs to be made upgrade-able so you dont have to spam qanta buildings or if they do it is the players choice to do that to spread out his quanta or keep it all in one place.

2.  Add more options, like increased vision radius, additional weapon points on units, increased unit speed both movement and turn rate, you could just call it agility upgrade.  basically make quanta more of a difficult choice as to where to spend it.  Ultimately that depth adds to players finding more weird and wonderful ways for us to do battle.   you could even have a quanta upgrade to increase quanta resource gathering!  increased metal gathering, increased radioactive gathering.  Its almost endless what you could add to the quanta research list.  

Making it difficult for the player to decide on whether to spend on research or orbitals would add a lot more depth to larger games.

Also I still think there needs to be more variety in end game units and ultimately larger units above t3 which are extreme in cost but also extreme in firepower and Armour for late game traveling across the map in LARGER maps.   The extreme cost would balance this on smaller maps as it would be worth producing verses a t2 spam early.   You could call them t4 or experimentals or titans etc ... but make them beefy enough that its worth the massive investment to produce.  

Nothing brings players to the table like ridiculously over-sized end game units.  Everyone always wants to be the first one to get one out.