What you do is create the first component, and plug in all the base Level 1 stats.
You then run the gridder, load your file, and punch in how you want each level to be different from the previous.
Add 5 minerals, multiply by 1.1, and then take it to the exponent 0.98, for example. There is a little preview window so you can see how the higer level abilities will compare with each other.
If you see the graph go into red or yellow values, you've got a problem, and some of the numbers will be insanely HUGE. Given a starting value of 60, and doubling every level for 10 levels gives you 30 thousand by the end.
Just plug in how many levels, what tech will be required for these changes and presto.
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You can plug the results back in to the tech gridder to make a tech grid (This second stage is the whole point of the gridder)
If the first time, you had missile range increase by 2 for every level of "Missile Weapons", for the second dimension, you may want to have the seeker resistance go up by 15 for every level of armor tech.
Given 5 levels of missile tech, and 6 levels of armor, you've now got 30 components coming out of the gridder
Keep an eye on the file size, though.
Empirical testing will show you that each dimension multiplies the size of your text file. A ten tech level dimesion added to the 400kb P&N components makes it 4megs.
However, the size of the zip file will only go up by a very small amount. I predict a 700MB (CD-sized) file generated with the tech gridder would fit, zipped, onto a single floppy disk.
So the download size of your mod will not be visibly affected by even excessive use of this tool
