Something like EU4's institution spread could influence how techs move across borders allowing players to open trade routes and make conquests in the right places if they want better techs sooner. Universities specializing in agricultural techniques or mechanical engineering could be founded on a state level. Countries can still offer contracts in certain categories for aspiring inventors (like better ships, cannons, or tractors). Players could still influence what technologies emerge. Games offer tech trees because they offer a lot of control for players, but I feel that some middle ground could be found between player choice and complete randomness. Likewise, as a developing nation, you might be relegated to just purchasing stocks of these state-produced weapons from other western powers until you can develop your own knowledge-based economy sector one day.
Overtime various inventors will offer increasingly better quality firearms with you the player having to make a choice of when to pay a lot to adopt them and setup state-centralized manufacturing. For example, it might make more sense for various inventors around the globe to emerge more often in countries with strong literacy, good patent/property rights, and a dynamic market economy. There's been a lot of debate on these forums about the game trying to simulate command economies vs free-market economies, and it seems like representations of the knowledge-economy is rather lacking in strategy games in general. And if you're unable or unwilling to pay, they might go abroad elsewhere and offer their ideas or services to someone else. You need to go through an expensive process of inviting foreign engineers, technicians, and craftsmen into your country who have the know-how to create such things. Likewise if you're an African or Asian country that just started the process of westernization, you can't just build a giant ammunition or cannon foundry because you researched a tech (like in Victoria 2). military (President Lincoln was offered to test it himself and ordered it to be produced) and Chile who evaluated it and adopted it to varying extents. Across the pond, the Spencer repeating rifle for example was developed by a private company and offered to the U.S. He then went around to various German states offering to sell the rifle and look for contracts to setup manufacturing facilities.
Johann Nicolaus von Dreyse was the son of a locksmith who founded a private manufacturing company which developed it. Using the picture of military technologies above as an example: a centralized bureaucracy didn't invent the famous breech-loading needle gun. But for a game that models history, does a traditional tech tree even make sense for the time period?
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