[Captain Kwok]

Fine!

I spent some time today testing both the shield effects and...I decided that I ended up liking the shield from damage method better...more or less for the same reason that ZeroAdunn mentioned a couple of Posts back. I had never really thought about it that way until I was playing around with it and it hit me what the big difference was.

Ed Kolis:

Each race will have their own unique ship construction tree. In addition, higher levels of research won't always mean bigger ships. Sometimes it will result in more powerful smaller ships like the Defiant.