Hi All,

I might be being stupid here, but....

I played a game to turn 250 or so and had a minor race with population 83.

I had built it up to be my main ship production site. Then I went to upgrade the 70ish production facilities to discover that the Type III fabricators could not be upgraded.

On the painful side I had to ditch my empire and start again with the save game from the start point, I had other places as level 6 mass replicators, so I'm sure I had the tech. Basically my star planet was about to be left in a productive abyss, which sort of turned me against it and made me think arghhhhhhhh. Since I had played from the same saved start game before and been able to upgrade the same place I felt a little upset with that particular map to say the least (it being randomly generated at the point of membership).

Does anyone know the rules on this? If you get foundaries or engineering guilds are they better than fabricators? Do they each have different upgrade limits?

Also, as a thought, and if the above is the case and I haven't missed something, surely it would be ok to be able to replace poorer tech minor races with your own better tech (OK, maybe at large cost - but that would be part of the fun!). No empire in real life would go in and not replace poorer technology.

Hope people can help me out here

Ben

you can check the differences with the buildings editor in your ../data/ folder. You'll see that Type 3 is equivalent to Type 6 for some buildings with regards to other races. We reduced the number of upgrades and tech levels (basically some type 1 means actually type 1 and 2 combined) with certain buildings depending on a race's attributes. Sometimes Type 3 is as good as Type 6, but most of the times it's a little worse since that particular building and its output is not a race's main trait so to speak.

Minors get randomly equipped with a "tech line" on their first membership or conquering. After that they keep their buildings if they get bribed or detach from your empire. Right now in that case they do not upgrade their tech so retaking a lost minor makes sense to do it fast.

Foundaries btw. are the best. Fabricators 3rd I think and Engineering guilds the worst.

about replacing tech, well, since it's a minor who can detach from your empire if he wants (if not conquered) you cannot really trust him that much. That's why they keep their tech and you yours for the sake of simplicity. If you could mix techs you could also take over the minor's better buildings and equip your home colonies with them. In the end you'd end up upgrading and changing structures all the time which we want to avoid since it's tedious micromanagement leading nowhere especially in multiplayer games.