[Warlord Adamus]

"Ahhh... go back and read what I said. I didn't say I ran out of weapons to research. Rather, I said that I ran out of 'decent' weapons to research. "

Thanks but I read it right the first time. Any weapon can be used effectively (except maybe the wormhole beam) if applied right. Besides, you can expect to see PPB changed eventually. Decent is subjective. If you researched through PPB and you consider it the only decent weapon then what's the solution, adding 10 more levels, copying MOO's miniaturization idea ? No, thanks.

"Good point. You don't lose the fruits of the research. But you do lose the fruits of buiding lots and lots of research facilities."

And those fruits would be ? Umm, the fruits of the research facilities ARE the techs that are derived from them, not the facilities themselves.

"I think my main complaint is twofold. First, the empire who heavily invests in research facilities is strongly penalized at a certain point in the game when s/he runs completely out of new tech to research. Second, this player is even more strongly penalized because s/he now has tons and tons of useless facilities lying around. Compare this to a player who builds only Intelligence facilities. These facilities have value from the start of the game to the end of the game."

He's not penalized, in most cases he has already out-teched everyone at the point that he no longer has anything to research. At that point he can scrap them by type with the press of a single button, so there are infact no useless facilities lying around, ever. Comparing it to intelligence isn't a good comparison, they have different outputs. And as I said, if the tech is already researched then 'research' is also effective from the beginning to the end, considering you use that tech on your ships.