I'm not sure if you can print the tech tree straight from the game files. There were a couple of large .jpeg versions of the tech tree posted a while ago, but the thread has been buried.

As for the gray soup... First of all there are two types of "soup": thick and thin. When a region is completely unexplored, you will not be able to see anything - not planets, not stars, nada. Once it has been explored it will still revert to fog of war (thin soup) when you have nothing within sensor range, but you will still be able to see the planets and stars. Eventually, if you have good enough espionage, you may be able to see your enemy's stuff despite the fog, but otherwise you're just going to have to get used to it.

As for why Stardock chose gray (although I think officially it's a shade of purple)... black would not work well because the background is black. With black unexplored & fog of war areas, you would never be able to tell visually whether you were really seeing the space and it was empty, or whether you needed to send someone with sensors to see.

Are you kidding? Black would have been awful. It the gray in GalCiv II is a major improvement over the black in GalCiv I. How would you be able to tell visible space from “fogged” space if both were black.

-Brian

Meanwhile I'll bet if you used the searched function on the left side of the forum page and typed , Tech Tree, into it you would find what you're looking for.

Wha...? When did they add the search feature? We've been asking for a search option for what seems like forever.