Deconstruct & Analyze too powerful?

Pax · #1 July 7th, 2002, 04:08 AM

Also consider the religious+psychic race that neglects many other forms of weaponry until they have allegience converters with a 100% hit rate. After that, why bother with most weapons research? Just grab an enemy ship or three, and D&A them.

Baron Munchausen · #2 July 7th, 2002, 04:32 AM

Isn't this realistic? How do most technologies spread? Someone gets a sample and figures out how to do it for themselves. I think the age of 'intellectual property' has distorted people's view of history. Copying has been the rule, not the odd exception, and has not been regarded as 'immoral' or 'unfair' either. That's a recent thing introduced by obsession with squeezing the Last penny out of patents.

PvK · #3 July 7th, 2002, 12:38 PM

I don't think it's very realistic to be able to duplicate a technology from an alien civilization one month after having one example of it. I think realistically, there would be many more tech levels and prerequisites in the way. You have to be pretty close to the same tech level and technique to really be able to make practical use of someone else's devices in the short term. It would be useful and provide ideas, and even same or lower tech levels could provide what would essentially be some research points, but not, I think, usually, the ability to immediately start building the same thing, unless it was really close to what you were already doing.

PvK

Lemmy · #4 July 7th, 2002, 12:40 PM

well, i suppose that's why you only gain one level per area, and not just get the level you examined, even if it was 10 levels higher than where you are now.

Baron Munchausen · #5 July 7th, 2002, 04:43 PM

Yes, it would be more realistic to have your progress accelerated than to simply acquire a tech all at once. If MM hadn't simplified the research model from SE III it would probably be possible to track each area and only award research points for each currently unknown tech in a ship when you analyze it. But we can only track research points in 12 techs in SE IV. I hope that SE V will restore a decent research model like MOO 3 is restoring the original MOO sliders.

Vildecor · #6 July 7th, 2002, 11:05 PM

As far as realism goes, I think how D&A works is decently close. Gaining one tech level above where you already were in a certain area isn't a far stretch when analyzing alien ships. ("Hey, these alien Quantum Engine IIIs look remarkably similar to our Quantum Engine IIs!")

The only thing that isn't very realistic, in my opinion, is being able to get the colonization techs from D&A (if you haven't gotten them already by then).

Deathstalker · #7 July 8th, 2002, 12:15 AM

What would actually be nice is two things: 1)option to turn off analyze for a game.
2) A flag in each of the components in the txt file to whether it can be gained by 'D&A' or not.

(and three...maybe analyze could be changed, instead of instant tech maybe it added a set # of research points into that tech type. ie, analyze Ion engines III and you have +10,000 points towards Propulsion research....)