The more Technology you research, the more diluted your Combat deck gets and the more difficult it is to discard Combat cards from your hand. Technology soon becomes a hindrance to winning battles, whereas it should increase the chances. For some time I’ve been wondering how to make the Research order more attractive. Staying with the videogame theme, by researching abilities, your units certainly don’t get weaker.
So I suggest the following variant to encourage use of techs.

For every different Technology acquired, you increase your initial Combat hand limit by 1, with the exception of tech cards that you place in your personal play area.
That applies to different techs, not multiple copies of the same tech. So by researching either Mind Control (one copy in the Tech deck), Psionic Storm (2 copies) or Increased Carrier Capacity (3 copies), you would still increase your Combat hand limit by 1 for each.
Any type of counter (depletion tokens if there are enough) may be placed on the Faction Sheet just above the Combat deck as a reminder of how many extra cards can be kept in your Combat hand.

Example : the Overmind investigates Spawn Broodling and after shuffling both cards into his Combat deck, he places a counter above his Combat deck reminding him he can now keep a Combat hand of 7 instead of 6. Later he investigates Sunken Colony and places another counter on his Faction Sheet, so his Combat hand limit is at 8 now. Later still he investigates Parasite. That doesn’t affect his Combat hand limit because it’s placed in his personal play area, not shuffled into the deck. Then he plays the Aggressive Strategy Event card so his Combat hand limit is increased to 9, although he doesn’t place another counter on his Faction Sheet, because the visible card is itself the reminder.

Exception : 3 technologies are replaced after use (Nuke, Increased Reaver and Carrier Capacity). If used you don’t lose the counter adding to your Combat hand, but if you research the same tech later, you can’t get another token.

So the longer the game progresses, the more your Combat hand grows and the better your units become, definitely in line with the videogame.

With your rules, hand limit may become too big, allowing players to keep almost entire unused Combat deck in their hands. Bonus per 1 technology is too much. Per 2 or even per 3 technologies should be OK.

Besides, you ignored that your variant weakens technologies allowing to "recharge" technology cards (which also increase Combat hand limit by 1).

I like the idea, although with this rule true "aggresive strategy" becomes much easier, this also includes playing Protoss (you always draw more cards than you need and discarding is much more important).

cyb3k: How big would your Combat hand get? In my experience research orders are used far less than the others. How many research orders do you see executed per player in a normal game? I'll guess 3? And I didn't forget the techs allowing Recharge. According to my variant you would increase your Combat hand by 1 again. So you could (using my example) be allowed a Combat hand of 10. Your entire Combat deck would hold 24 cards.

I think the problem comes when the Regrouping Phase ends and we have to reduce our Combat hand to its limit (normally 6). In my example the Zerg may have Spawn Broodling and Sunken Colony cards in their hand. Why should they have to then choose just 4 more Combat cards for the next round? They may not even have used either of their techs yet, so why should they have to discard each one and lose their abilities for the benefit of getting a more complete set of Combat cards?

I think you are perceiving a problem where there isn't one. You aren't meant to buy ALL the technology, the game is designed to reward players who focus on one aspect of the tech tree of their race while it punishes those who don't focus by diluting their combat deck.

Next game try not buying so much tech.

blarknob said:

I think Blarknob here got the point: if tech was buffed, it will be a race to get all the techs, regardless their effectiveness, only because of the grater hand capacity.

Now you have to choose which tech to buy, a big part of your strategy, nerfing that will worsen the game (imho)

In my games we know our technology decks and research accordingly. Apart from the first time we ever played, nobody tried to get all the technologies or buildings available. Given a competitive group, most people will choose to resaerch specific technologies and then use them. Most Protoss I've ever seen immediately went for Archons and Arbiters and then bashed their neighbors. Humans tend to get Wraiths and Research ships. Most Zerg will go for good Zerglings and then try to hold out using the fairly cheap Hydralisks and maybe some Scourges. Keep in mind, this is just my group. Other groups may go for different technologies.

Also, a fairly important aspect of StarCraft ist not to have all possible units and then hope your combat cards match. You choose attacking troops based on what cards you have. Everything else would just defeat the purpose of good tactics.