quote:
Technology is the key to victory. While you should be able to steal or otherwise aquire technology, there should be restrictions on how fast you can use it and when you can begin to research additional levels.
I've never managed to steal or discover tech faster than I can research it. Mostly because I research so much so fast that rapidly the AI has nothing left to give me and the ruins all come up empty.
Nevertheless, the simplest way to incorporate what your're thinking of is insteado f giving you one tech level, a new research project is added to your queue and a percentage of the value of each tech level you don't have is added to the points already spent. So if you have shields 1 and reverse engineer a ship with shields 2, you might only get 1/4 of the way to shields 2. But if you reverse engineered one with shields 4 you'd probably complete shields 2. If you already had your tech queue cluttered, you'd better wait or your scientists will get all that valuable data lost in buerocratic shuffling. May not be the world's more realistic, but it's not bad, and it would be simple to code.
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