quote:
Originally posted by Marty Ward:
Isn't that penalizing the race that chooses the Organic or Crystal trait? They cannot benefit as much as a race that did not choose one.
It would be more work but less unbalancing if each level of the weapons and technologies needed the intermeadiate level. It could be the same level so the AI wouldn't have to research 10 levels of junk for the shard weapons. This way you could only capture part of the entire tech tree.
Since this is only going to be used by a human player it seems that you should limit the gain.
I agree it's probably a bit unbalancing, but I'm not sure I understand you're proposed solution. When I capture say a Xiati ship I can only get one tech level in temporal weapons from analyzing it, and a maximum of whatever tech level weapon that ship was using. I guess another balance issue is that AI will not analyze ships and utilize the new technologies. But this is pretty much a problem with a capture and analyze oriented race or strategy already, since you can allocate more of your colonies towards intel or resource production instead of research.
Once you open up a field by researching a prerequisite you can research all levels in that field. I don't think you can tag each individual level with a requirement. Or are you suggesting something like a seperate tech level for each weapon ie Crystal Weapons Level 2 which is a seperate tech but requires the intermediate tech and Crystal Weapons Level 1? It could be done but frankly since I'm only using this mod for myself right now and I can make myself follow some guidelines I don't think I want to edit the AI research queue to add in all the seperate tech levels. This idea would probably be good for a multiplayer Version of a mod or one for general distribution, but I was just posting what I did so other people could see that it worked and could try it out for themselves. Not saying this a bad idea or anything just that since I'm only using it for myself right now I don't feel like doing the extra work. However, what I might do to even things out is to lower the costs of the racial traits to access organic, cystal, and temporal tech and boost the AI's other characteristics.
[This message has been edited by jc173 (edited 16 May 2001).]