Viewing older technologies

Nope. There isn't any way to do this in-game. That was my main comment to Malfador after playing the Demo.

As best I can determine, there are two ways to compare older technologies to current ones. Either you write down the older specs using a "stubby pencil" so you can do comparisons later. Or, you can open up the data files in Notepad, do some calculations and compare old to new that way. Either way, it's a bit frustrating.

Just look at one of the ships you built before?
why do you really need to know what size the older ones are anyway?
it's old tech.

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an se5a is a ww1 fighter, it is also a car.

The number one reason you need to compare new tech to old tech is so you can decide if it was worth researching. For example, you start out with Level 1 of Armour which gives you

Armor 5 kt gives 25 kt protection
Small Armor 1 kt gives 1 kt protection

Let's say it is going to cost you 2000 points to get to the new level. Is it worth it?

You don't know. So you research it. What did you get?

Armor 5 kt gives 30 kt protection
Small Armor 1 kt gives 2 kt protection

Let's say you didn't design a ship. So you can't look at your previous design. Now, the next armor level is 4000 points. But is it worth it? Was it worth it to research it the first time? If you can only see the current tech level, you don't really know. What if you are only building ships? Is it worth 4000 points to go from 30 kt protection to 35 kt?

On the other hand, if you are building lots of fighters, is it worth it to go from 2kt to 3kt protection? In the first case, you are only getting a 16% improvement. In the second case, you are getting a 50% improvement.

But if you can't compare the levels to establish the trend, you don't really know if it was worth it or not. Granted, it is probably not all that realistic to be able to establish *exactly* what sort of improvement you can get. Still, it would be nice to see that you aren't just wasting your points.

Given how awesomely cool it is to place SEV in a window and/or to minimize the game while you are playing, I can see folks writing programs to show ALL the levels of a particular component.

Well, as a workaround it isn't hard to make the components display how much they gained last level and how much they'd gain this level. Only problem is fitting all the information in!

for the Armor example:
Ability 2 Type := Star - Unstable
Ability 2 Description := [%Amount1%] protection last level- next level gives [%Amount2%] protection.
Ability 2 Scope := Space Object
Ability 2 Range Formula := 0
Ability 2 Amount 1 Formula := 25 + (([%Level%] - 2) * 3)
Ability 2 Amount 2 Formula := 25 + (([%Level%]) * 3)

Star - Unstable does nothing in a component, so you can use it as a label. If you wanted to get a little fancier, you could make the forumla show the improvement per level only.

Would be nice to have this information handy in-game, but until then this sort of thing could help.

That's pretty slick! Thanks for showing how to do that.

For me, it's easier to just open Components.txt in Notepad.

Rather than do that on all those components, I'm enough of a 'geek' that I'd rather write a program to read the file than manually edit the existing one. But that would require that I stop playing...

I would love to be able to build ships with older technology again.
I used to use this feature in SE IV PBW a lot.
In one game I agreed to build & sell ships to a partner. I wasn't selling the best technology ships to him, but he didn't know that.
Until I can select any level of technology to put on my ships, would be unable to repeat this in SE V.
Baron Grazic

I agree. It would be nice to be able to design new ships using older technology. I used to do the same thing in SEIV, putting older technology on ships to trade with another empire.

Grazic, that's pretty clever.

I agree. I wish you could build ships with older tech. If nothing else, it sometimes means you can get the ship built a turn or two earlier.

On a related note regarding facilities, I think we had discovered that your resource output is greater by first building Level 1 Mineral Miners and then upgrading them to L2 or L3.

Another reason for accessing older technologies is in the case of mines and satellites (and probably Weapon Platforms, though I'm not using those). Adding 2kT storage for each level of satellite really messes things up. Case in point:

Satellites
Level 1: 80kT
Level 2: 82kT
Level 3: 84kT
Level 4: 100kT (medium Satellite)
Level 5: 102kT
Level 6: 104kT
Level 7: 120kT (large Satellite)

The storage added in-between Satellite types is pretty much useless, and decreases the number of Satellites you can put on your ships. If I have 1200kT carge space on a ship (5 x level 3 Cargo Bays), I can put 15 satellites on it at 80kT per satellite, but only 14 satellites at 84kT per satellite. And the extra 4kT per satellite is worthless.

I *think* units have a seperate "tonage taken" value which doesn't change... I'll have to look that up, not something I worry about too often.

There are 10 types of people in the world:

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