Greyed out Techs?

Level 10 is the maximum for Huge Hull construction... there's still another of ships available - Base Ships - but you'll need to do some research in large base construction to open up that technology.

-----

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

Well when you combine all of the different levels of each discipline, plus the levels unlocked by reaching a certain level of tech (stellar manipulation, etc) and the unique racial trait techs - you have quite literally thousands of tech levels to research. I don't think the claim has been made that each tech has thousands of levels.. that would get kinda crazy (and a bit boring, I mean hitting tech level 900 in ship construction after a couple hundred hours of playtime?)

-Currently subjecting multiple galaxies to the doom of conquer or blackholes

These do max out but if I work it out right you will have researched 50+ tech levels of various ship hulls to get to huge hulls as you have to have Tl 5 in a ship hull type to research the next one. So that’s not a short research tree also to get the most out of the hull you are going to have to have spent millions of research points on the technologies that go in it. If you want proof have a look at the forum and listen to the tales about killing AI dreadnoughts with frigates or destroyers with the proper tech advantages.

Trust me after 100 years I have some good stuff but there is still plenty to research for example I hardly use mines and have TL3 in them but do use gun and recon Sats as a defence for colonies so have TL10 Sats with Tl18 sensors & guns in them and it now occurs to me that I need to upgrade them as my weapon and sensor tech is better than that now the design being three game years old. My biggest ships are Battle cruisers at TL7 as I am not a huge ship fan and my heavy cruisers are quite capable of standing up against my main opponents Dreadnoughts and Battle cruisers

I see your point there, maybe modding the data files to increase the dreadnought tonnage earlier?

-Currently subjecting multiple galaxies to the doom of conquer or blackholes

The game is quite easy to Mod I haven’t tried it yet as I am enjoying the stock game but I am tempted to borrow the AI changes from the Balance Mod to make the game more of a challenge. I would not recommend that Mod to PsiSoldier as other parts of it shorten the tech tree some what

Balance mod reduces the overall number of techs, but increases teh costs.

There are 10 types of people in the world:

Those that understand binary, and those that don't.

I prefer a small number of deeper tech trees. In my mod, I'm cutting out several tech trees, such as merging all of the weapon mount techs, merging all of the space hull techs, and adding some benefits to other techs.