Never enough Tech's, here's some ideas

[raynor]

Definitely some interesting ideas.

IMHO, MM probably won't have time to add any radically different techs for several months. There are already *tons* of techs the AI ships don't know how to use effectively yet. I'm thinking the priority will be to get the AI using those techs before new ones are added.

There are a couple of weapons which are similar to ship disabling weapons. Some weapons damage shields; some damage armour; some weapons disable/destroy weapons. I haven't seen the AI use these much or very effectively but they are there.

The universal colony pod idea would certainly same me some trouble later in my games. But by the time I would have researched an advanced tech like this, I'm building just one type of colony ship anyways and using my excess resources to retrofit it over to the other two designs.

My best suggestion to you is to think of weapons which just require modifications to the values of existing weapons. For example, could we create a direct fire weapon which has the max range of 20, a high to-hit value but does little damage. Or, do we want it to have high damage but be incredibly high up the tech tree. Or, what about a weapon that never misses but requires point blank range? Each of these weapon ideas should be easy to create within the existing game framework. Of course, the hardest part is still getting the AI to use them once you have created them...