[geoschmo]

Personally I was not all that great a fan of the starting tech levels system in SEIII anyway. You could get another level of propulsion for the same cost as a level of steallar manipulation. That didn't make much sense. There needed to be some way to factor in the variable cost in research for different techs.

Although I am sure it helped to speed up those Multiplayer games some. With simultaneous turns in SEIV that really isn't as much of a critical determining factor anymore.

If you don't want to research every tech every game, do a medium tech start. If that is too low, tweak the "raise levels" in the text file. If you don't want everybody to have the same tech start, you can try my idea. Or we can get back to work on the racial tech/start tech mod. The point is you have options. You don't have to wait for a code change that might not happen, and that not everyone would agree is a good idea.

Geoschmo