[dogscoff]

I'm no modder either (and I haven't had time to explore my precioussss new Version of proportions) but hopefully PvK is keeping an eye on thisd thread and will take your comments on board.

As for the colony techs... I wonder if it would be possible to duplicate each of the colony techs: Have a 'native' coloniser compoonent available at research lvl 1 that means you can build colonisers from turn 1, but make it dependent on some unresearchable tech so that non-natives can't ever research it. Then have a second set of 'non-native' colony techs with the ten-level tree for researching/ trading/ capture. This would have the advantage of allowing 'native' colonisers to have smaller, cheaper, more efficient components.

The problem here would be preventing trading/ capture of the 'native' tech- does anyone know if there's any way of making a tech uncapturable and untradeable? (Apart from using racial traits)