Excellent bit of deduction here Mark. I have run some more tests and have some observations...
Trading techs is not a problem. As long as they are not listed as racial techs in the TechArea.txt files at the time of the trade, they can be traded. (Actually Racial techs can be traded as well, but the race receiveing it has to have that racial trait as well to be able to understand it.)
I ran some tests making Construction, Fighters, Mines, and Tropps all as Racial techs. As long as you select Construction
and the other tech, you can research the higher levels once the TechArea.txt is back to normal. (As you expected, just confirming that one.)
The idea doesn't seem to work with multiple levels of the same tech though. I tried a few different tests and the best I could do was get it to allow one player level 1 fighters and one level 2 fighters at game startup. Which was what I was going for, but then when the TechArea.txt file goes back, they both end up with level one fighters, and the guy that selected level 2 fighters has to research construction, even though he had it as a racial trait. Either the game is getting confused or I fumble fingered something cause that doesn't make sense to me.
What should work though would be to change the TechArea.txt file so that there are no levels. Instead of Fighters levels 1 through 3, you would have seperate tech areas for Fighters I, Fighters II and Fighters III. It would flatten out the Tech Tree, actually it wouldn't be a tree anymore, it would be a list.
But then you could go as far as you wanted with this idea, depending on some hypothetical limit to the number of racial techs. You could truly select any tech at game startup. And as long as you selected that techs prerequisits you would also be able to research it further in the game. If you didn't select the prereq's you would have to research them all before you could move on. Also if there was a comp that required level 3 of propulsion (Emergency propulsion IIRC) then selecting level 6 would not give it to you. You would have to select level 1 through 6 of propulsion.
Not sure what the limit to the Racial Tech areas is. Maybe 255? We'd have to check with Aaron on that. The Racial Trait file would get pretty big as well. We'd have to rewrite the comp.txt and VehicleSize.txt and Facilities.txt files. But they wouldn't get any bigger really. You'd just have to go through and change the requirements. For example if you had a component that required Propulsion level 6, you would change that to require Propulsion VI level 1.
Would require a lot of changes to the files, but you'd only have to do it once. One hard part would be deciding what amount of racial points to require for each tech.
You'd also have to redo the AI's, but that wouldn't be as difficult as it might seem. I have some ideas already about that. It should be possible to adjust them so they function in this environment as well as in the stock one.
Geoschmo