DeletedUser
True, but you can't open up the option for aerial support without unlocking Bionics, which needs, yup, plastics. Like I said, EVERY tech that requires a CE good other than plastics is behind a tech that requires plastics. Of the CE goods, plastics are the first bottleneck you hit regardless of how you try to climb the tech tree.
I don't mind having a tree that's bottlenecked on two goods early on, because it's very unlikely that I'll be missing both of those goods, so I can probably trade one for the other, as other people are going to be bottlenecked on what I do have, and some of those people are going to have what I need. But having the tech tree bottlenecked by just one good makes that one good too valuable. Even if you have nothing but plastic and I have everything but plastic, you can get farther in the tech tree than I can, including getting access to the Assault Tank. That's not balanced.
My position in game: I've got one tech left to spend forge points on before I can't spend any more forge points on tech (I stockpiled over 600 forge points to get a head start on the tech tree), because I've already got every tech that isn't hiding behind a plastics requirement, and I can't even build my third goods building because the tech for it requires plastics. The only military building I can reach without plastics is the missile site. This doesn't sound balanced to me, though I'll admit that it's only as obvious as it is to me because I'm getting the shaft by it.
I don't have an easy solution to this. Removing the plastics requirement for Bionics would unlock enough of the tree, but that would mean that plastics only unlocks a single tech, which wouldn't be fair to those that have plastics. I think this is more of a request to look over future tech trees for overly blocking goods so that we don't wind up here again.
