Techs you should never choose and why

[Spud Dastardly]

I've done a lot of digging into the game's code and discovered that certain techs just aren't worth choosing no matter what your play style. To be clear, some of these techs are worth using if you're creative or can get them through spying/trading, but as far as choosing them over the alternative, these are the ones you should never choose. This only applies to the unmodded game, not the 5x mod. Here's the list:

• Heavy armor Okay, this one can have some use.
  
• Fighter Bays: Obvious. Fighters are no good. Extra space from battle pods is good.
  
• Armor barracks and Battleoids: See here. They don't get racial or leader bonuses or bonuses from personal shield, anti grav harness, or powered armor. You can't attack with armor units either.
  
• Beam weapons: They suffer 4 times damage reduction from shields compared to cannons. Early game, chance to hit is too low, so fusion beams suck. Ion pulse cannon gets terrible armor penetration, so they only do 75% damage after shield damage reduction. Plasma cannons are a little better, but hyper x capacitors with shield piercing gauss cannons is a much better choice.
  
• Bio terminators: Huge diplomatic penalty. Even if you don't care about that, the only thing they offer over death spores is a better chance to hit, which is not worth it compared to the bonus from universal antidote.
  
• Electronic computer: Doesn't offer a good enough beam hit bonus to be worth it. Maybe a beam attack focused race could use it. Otherwise, stick to missiles early game and take deep scanner. If you're omniscient, you don't need deep scanner, but electronic computer is still a wasted cost on your ships.
  
• Stealth suit: This one is bugged and actually increases the missions risk. This is fixed in my bug fixes mod however, so you can choose it if you're using that mod.
  
• Galactic cybernet: You only get the research bonus for 1 planet. The security doesn't do much for you if you've got a few spies on counter espionage already. Galactic currency exchange is definitely better.
  
• Supercomputer: At this late stage in the game, you have almost finished the tech tree and don't need any more research techs. Spies starting at level 5 is much better.
  
• Neutronium Bomb: Bombers are terrible, and neutronium bomb only offers a 5% better chance to hit over anti matter bomb. If you followed my advice about choosing anti matter bomb over ion pulse cannon, neutronium gets you almost nothing. The alternative is the best drive in the game.
  
• Hyper Drive: If you're not going to take neutronium bomb, you're going to get interphased drive, which comes one tier after Hyper drive. Hyper X capacitors are extremely good and a much better choice.
  
• Deep Core Mine: The way pollution is currently set up, you have to take core waste dumps every time. Deep core mine would be great otherwise. Pollution immunity trait is bugged and still lets biomes degrade, so even then you still have to take core waste dumps.

Any other choices are arguable in my opinion, but these should be made the same way every time. Thoughts?

[bilbous]

Most of those are spot on. I have yet to find a reason to ever go for beam weapons, I might stick some on my missile ships later on in the game to replace the anti-missile rockets but useless defensive crapola is pretty useless regardless.

If you pursue a pronged tech development strategy a couple of those techs are more tradeable than others such as the bombs and the stealth suit. Do you really need the best drive in the game?

[Minotower]

Regarding Heavy armor, I think best case it gives you 50% damage reduction, at least that's what I remember from the formula. Say you have 30 armor penetration vs 10 armor resilience, so you do 3x the damage. If you'd double the armor resilience to 20, you'd only take 1.5x the damage, meaning they need double the previous amount of gunfire to kill your ship.

Electronic computer buffs your starbases, outposts and PD cannons early game, at the time the AI likely has a bigger fleet than you have (at least at a decent difficulty level). I play slow tech, so by the time I research this, deep scanner has no use for me.

I do think the base game is pretty meh, so I only do mods (yours is excellent)

[Spud Dastardly]

Originally posted by bilbous:

Most of those are spot on. I have yet to find a reason to ever go for beam weapons, I might stick some on my missile ships later on in the game to replace the anti-missile rockets but useless defensive crapola is pretty useless regardless.

If you pursue a pronged tech development strategy a couple of those techs are more tradeable than others such as the bombs and the stealth suit. Do you really need the best drive in the game?

Trading stealth suit to your enemies is an interesting way to give yourself a security buff I suppose. But if you're planning to do any spying yourself, I wouldn't go for it. I still think interphased drive is the best choice. If you take Hyper X capacitors over hyper drive, then interphased is a pretty good upgrade. More drive speed gives you more ship defense.

Originally posted by Minotower:

Regarding Heavy armor, I think best case it gives you 50% damage reduction, at least that's what I remember from the formula. Say you have 30 armor penetration vs 10 armor resilience, so you do 3x the damage. If you'd double the armor resilience to 20, you'd only take 1.5x the damage, meaning they need double the previous amount of gunfire to kill your ship.

Electronic computer buffs your starbases, outposts and PD cannons early game, at the time the AI likely has a bigger fleet than you have (at least at a decent difficulty level). I play slow tech, so by the time I research this, deep scanner has no use for me.

I do think the base game is pretty meh, so I only do mods (yours is excellent)

The formula is
Damage = Base.Weapon.Damage * Max((Weapon.Penetration / Target.Resilience), 0.75)
It actually never occurred to me that weapon penetration might be greater than the resilience, in which case you could get multipliers greater than 1. You're right about the heavy armor then.

I guess you're right about defenses using electronic computer, but I never find myself being attacked at that stage in the game except by pirates, which are no threat.

[Minotower]

Small galaxy, max opponents, impossible difficulty, your balance mod with some more diplo tweaks, turn 50 I had my first war declared on my, 10 turns later my second. I'm happy for all the buffs my defense gets. But with larger galaxies, it's not needed.

You can change the 0.75 value in the globals.yaml if you want to boost heavy armor a bit, personally I think it's fine.

[bilbous]

I would never take planetary stock exchange. sure the 2 credits per pop is nice but you have to waste time building it everywhere. City planning gives you 5 more population per planet passively and the currency market is just three techs away. Once you build that you are swimming in cash. I can't remember a game where I wasn't able to acquire the stock market anyway. When you have that much cash flow ships are expendable.So what if you lose a couple of your 20 titans if you kill his 100 strong mixed fleet. He isn't going to rebuild faster than you can buyout the replacements. I've even left my home territories devoid of ships because I could buyout enough titans in the few turns it takes his fleets to get from the edge of my sensor range to anywhere he could do any damage to scuttle his fleet. Once I get the currency market it doesn't take long to build up a treasury of more than 50,000 credits.

I usually end up with most techs just from trading, whatever I research.

[Spud Dastardly]

I don't need a code edit for that. The 0.75 is moddable. I was going to set it to 0.50 for the next 5x version.

[Space Invader]

Yeah those are all pretty much spot on. There are situational exceptions, but for the most part it's a good guide.

[Spud Dastardly]

Yeah, I worry that armor being able to completely negate damage might be too powerful. Ion pulse cannon, for example, would be totally useless at 5 armor penetration. 50% damage reduction seems fine.

[Apheirox]

Incredibly annoying PC game developers can't get even the basic stuff right. Thanks for a valuable post, and for your 5x mod.

[Spud Dastardly]

Doc, I'm considering removing the max function for the resilience thing. I need to make sure it's balanced. If I allowed heavy armor to always reduce damage by 2 times, then it will always be better than reinforced hull. I'd have to reduce it so it reduced damage by a factor of 1.5.

The list isn't valid with 5X because 5X rebalances everything, so some of these choices aren't so bad after all. For example, fighter bays are actually worth using, and you get them for free in 5X.

Beam weapons have "procs," which means the weapon hits that many times. However many procs it has, that's how much you multiply the damage reduction for shields by.