Frogboy - Change to the random techs that you get when invading a planet...

Well, your points about weaponary aren't quite true. Cavemen, for example, didn't understand the mechanics involved with gravity, but knew that driving a bunch of mammoths off of a cliff onto a spike pit killed them. You don't need to understand the aerodynamic shape and firing velocity of a bullet to be able to shoot someone. Stealing tech from the DL is a valid way of winning the game, one Frogboy himself used in a game example.

dont change it thats a great feature! i love that feature i dont want it to be changed if any thing it should be improved so you get all the techs in between your current tech and that one! its not that you wouldnt understand the tech just because you have to research to get it. if you went back in time and gave the northern guys in the civil war AK 47's they wouldnt go "oh my god i cant figure out how to put this long "clip" as you call it into the slot, they would asom (sorry cant spell ) it was a new gun. my point is you would understand it.there should be a feature to take care of getting far advanced techs but if you want to, get any random tech

I love it, to get high tech as a reward for a invasion...

Darklor

It doesn't make sense to be able to immediately build a ship with a highly advanced technology that you are far, far away from researching yourself. I can understand getting it and keeping it until you have researched the necessary technologies to understand it (i.e. research everything elading up to it and you can use it without spending any research points for it), or only being able to capture techs you can comprehend (i.e. can research now, or 1 step beyond what you can research now, and also get the prerequisite free).

I just wish it would let you choose like on SMAC.

Yeah you should get a tech that u can research and only if there are no such techs it should pick arandom one ( or none) great solution !!!

no, because if you invade somewhere and say they leave behind their uber-gun, there is a thing called reverse engineering. you have the one gun, so you can probably figure out how it is made by reverse engineering, thats not saying you know anything more about the tech before or after it, you can just manage to make copies of this one gun you found, it makes perfect sense. same thing applies with engines, or shields whatever.

Cavemen, for example, didn't understand the mechanics involved with gravity, but knew that driving a bunch of mammoths off of a cliff onto a spike pit killed them

Point granted Marcathonas but give a caveman a submarine or a fighter plane and I wonder how useful they would find it. Or, if we on Earth captured any basic ship from Gal Civ, I doubt we would be able to use and understand it completly from the moment we captured it, instead it would give us new research ideas etc.
Enigma's point about an AK-47 in the civil war - yes a guy could use it but when it ran out of ammo - they wouldn't have the technology to make more - it would simply represent a target for them to research towards.

However, at the end of the day, gameplay is what is important and it does have a huge huge affect- if I get doomray from the DL's first planet, then the game is going to be far far easier than if I dont. It encourages me to concede weak planets so that hopefully I can recapture them easily and get a mega tech.
Or remove all the population off a load of worlds in transports - keep the transports around the planets - give them all to an advanced ai and then recapture them all straight away and probably netting me a lot of valuable techs in the process.

Being able to get any tech introduces a random variable which can be exremely powerful. Random events are great and should impact the game but only to a certain extent. The random tech can turn into a cheese factor/'tactic'

Well you would know how to use it, because they gave you the technology. Wouldn't that mean they give you all the knowledge you need?

This is something with quite a precedent in sci-fi in general - in Stargate SG-1 the humans often use Goa'uld / Asgard technology without knowing how it works. That doesn't prevent them from being able to use it though, just means that they can't really use it to it's full potential.

In terms of game balance, IMO it's not really that big a problem (if you see it as that) except in the campaign. In sandbox mode, if someone is far enough ahead of you in tech for you to be stealing something massively advanced you're probably getting your ass handed to you in pretty short order anyway.

I still prefer the idea about blueprints. It wouldn't hurt if you capture a very advanced blueprint, but as it would only shorten the research time for one particulat tech, you would need to research the whole tree up until you can use it.

To make it more interesting, one should maybe get two more blueprints of the same tree when capturing an advanced tech he is still far away from researching himself ...

Point granted Marcathonas but give a caveman a submarine or a fighter plane and I wonder how useful they would find it. Or, if we on Earth captured any basic ship from Gal Civ, I doubt we would be able to use and understand it completly from the moment we captured it, instead it would give us new research ideas etc. Enigma's point about an AK-47 in the civil war - yes a guy could use it but when it ran out of ammo - they wouldn't have the technology to make more - it would simply represent a target for them to research towards.

True, but remember 2 things. One is that if you gave the cavemen a new type of weapon (like, as you said, a plane) they wouldn't have a clue. But Doom Ray is merely a powerful beam weaepon. In the campaign the Terrans know how beam weapons work. They also have infinite ammo in the form of limitless energy via cold fusion. So if you gave the civil war fighter a warehouse of ammo, showed him how the clip worked, and went away, he'd be able to use it all. Same basic idea here.

Don't forget that at the end of every campaign round you lose the tech anyway. And I've never used it in DL on parade, since I always seem to have researched better weapons on a different tree (I normally play slow tech but for DL I switch it to fast)

hes right plus you could show them how to make ammo, they had gun powder,and the other guy with reverse engineering,basicly its a contriversal issue.i think you should have a button of some short that says"would you like to be able to aquire advanced techs?".or you could trues to but the weapons componets toward a surten weapons tech increasing attack of each weapon by 25 percent of the reverse engineered weapons power.but please dont get rid of this feature some of us love it

Actually, it makes sense to be able to steal a technology and not know the preceding techs. I can give an example that actually relates to the spoils of war!

By World War II, the the best way to record a message for use of propaganda was by using a sort of strip of metal that is then used for recording. But this form of recording left its message unclear and a magnetized white noise. By the end of the war, a model of a new magnetophone was stolen by a soldier whos name I'm forgetting. It uses tape rather than metal, coats the tape with iron oxide, and is then prerecorded in order to minimize the white noise. Well the item was sold to the US who proceded to reproduce copies of the "futuristic technologies" of the Germans. They would able to then pick up from the magnetophone and create tape recorders, cds, then the almighty iPod.

Good post JamieJME i too have asked for no tech stealing (invasion or otherwise) unless you have the prerequisite in one of homepage entrys.

Quite frankly the argument over whether skipping sometimes over half the tech tree (eg laser to doom ray) is realistic or not doesn't matter. The fact is it's potentially very game unbalancing and also not very fun.

Changing it should def be a priority in the next patch or maybe give an option in the game so we can choose.

I disagree. If you capture a planet that has records of research, blueprints, etc --- then why not be able to acquire the technology. The way it is currently implemented makes perfect sense.

Easily exploitable, give a planet, take it, give, take, give take. You don't need to make peace to give them gifts.

As for stealing technologies, it isn't a 100% sure-fire. And even if you steal one, what are the chances of jumping from Laser I to Doom Ray considering all the extra technologies within the line heck or even the whole tech tree. Also, it wouldn't be really unbalancing. In order to steal that tech, you needed an enemy that already had Doom Ray, you're merely jumping to their height.

BUT as for building production, I would like to point out the possibility of manipulating the superior enemy by giving him a planet, taking it back, with high end buildings being built. I'm alright with using this technique once or twice, but I would like to suggest for the AI to catch onto this technique, only update a hazardous, by hazardous I mean REALLY hazardous, planet once it has been sufficiently protected. And, I would even give props if all races, or maybe just evil, were to perform a "scorched earth" technique on hazardous planets! Which means, if the computer knows a superior race is assembling transports against a planet, the AI will deconstruct ALL improvements on the planet, I would love this game even more for the shrewdness of the action.

Anyway back to the subject, no I think the tech stealing is good, the idea of give and take I consider a legit strategy but so long as the AI catch on to the strategy, maybe even perform it themselves.

Hi!

...the random techs that you get when you capture a planet. I just feel that it messes up the game slightly to get an uber tech that you are no where near researching.

Stars! has that solved in a different way: when you successfully roll for a tech, you get tech points, not blueprints.

The same solution could be applied here: the more advanced tech you would capture, the more tech points in that area you'd get. If the captured tech would be really high your race could advance several tech levels after the event.

BR, Iztok

I just dont think any single random event should have the ability to completly and utterly change the whole game.
Also it makes the game too easy and stops weapon specialisation being as important - later on in the game, you will more than likely have stolen high techs for all weapon and shield types.

When you get the tech in the game you cget full usage. In sg1 and in real life if you found a great piece of tech you might get some usage but no way full usage. The point about giving a few small planets to take them back to get great tech illustrates how this is not working. The chance of this occuring needs to be lowered and the odds of getting a tech above your level should be reduced depending on how far away it is. You have Laser 1 and then the odds of getting Laser 2 should be say 20% of the time you land. Laser 3 at 10%, Laser 4 and 3% and so on. It should be almost impossible to get a great tech.