[Mark Walton]

It seemed to work in my test - important thing is, don't change the racial traits file back, only the tech areas.

Did a quick test; my "fighter" race was able to create and design fighters even after the tech was switched back to non-racial. I'll do more tests later.

Edit : Quick further test

1. Other races can't use the tech unless they choose the race special, until they research it (I know that was the idea, but it was worth testing!)

2. The tech cannot be futher researched until the "real" prerequisites are known. At this point the tech is just "there" as if it had been researched normally. (If you wanted, you could do the same trick with "Construction" and get players to choose both, then they could research from turn 1)

3. Haven't tested trading the tech (yet)

4. Have to decide at start what tech level any players will get (ie can't have one player choosing tech level 1 fighters, another player choosing level 2)

This gives us possible options for the regular racial techs... needs some experimentation but we may be able to make them tradable / learnable / researchable.

One thing I'm doing in my mod is making the current "ruins" techs into normal techs with extreme research costs. So, a player can research Neural Combat Nets (but it's probably prohibitively expensive). Most often, players will get that tech by landing on a ruins world (not a unique one, just a regular one, and getting lucky)

I might try combining this idea with the racial-startup ideas here.

One test; can we research techs which have our "special" tech as a prerequisite, even if we haven't learned the tech-reqs for our special tech?

[ 19 December 2001: Message edited by: Mark Walton ]

[ 19 December 2001: Message edited by: Mark Walton ]