Should Sensors Get Tech Information?

[SteveAlt (OP)]

I have reached the point where I am rewriting the sensor phase. Something that affects performance is the variety of different checks performed on sensors gaining tech information on other ships. While deciding how best to implement this with the object model, I stopped to consider whether this should remain in its current form at all. I know there are different views on this area so I thought I would open it up for debate. At the moment thermal sensors can gain information on engines, EM sensors can gain information on shields and active sensors  can get information on everything else. A ship can prevent the thermal and active scans by raising shields but this actually makes it easier for the EM sensors.

Something to bear in mind as well is that because of this tech detection ability, using active sensors is regarded as a very hostile act. Removing this ability would make active sensors much more prevalent in safe systems with multiple races, such as in a multi-nation start on Earth, although there would still be the downside of giving yourself away to potentially hostile forces in less safe areas. This would probably make things easier in terms of monitoring traffic in inhabited systems but actually increase the number of sensor checks carried out, which might have a performance impact of its own.

The options I can think of at the moment are:

1) Leave things as they are now

2) Change the way it works slightly by checking the chance of tech gain before examining the target ship. Currently the ship details are accessed and then a check is made against each background tech connected with each component, which means you can learn more than one tech at once. A change to this option would mean a check up front to determine if anything was going to be learned and then accessing the database to pick the background tech for a random component. This is less detailed but faster.

3) Remove the entire tech detection idea

4) As 3) but also change wreck salvage and scrapping of captured ships to have a good chance of tech point gains similar to current tech scans, rather than the existing system of learning to build a specific system. Essentially, a good chance of tech from salvage/scrapping would replace a low chance of tech from scanning. This option retains the ability to gain tech, removes the possibly too-powerful tech-scanning ability of active sensors, improves performances and allows more active sensor use without a casus belli. A downside is that if you are outclassed, you may not get to salvage any wrecks. Conversely, you would have more chance of getting data from the occasional precursor wrecks scattered through the galaxy.

5) Remove the ability for normal active sensors to detect tech data and instead add some new type of dedicated, expensive and relatively short-ranged scanner system with this ability

I am sure there are other ideas I haven't thought of yet so all suggestions and comments welcome.

Steve

[Erik L]

Make it so that you do not get active sensor data unless the ship has been targetted via the F8 screen.

[SteveAlt (OP)]

Make it so that you do not get active sensor data unless the ship has been targetted via the F8 screen.

Interesting idea! Effectively this would mean that fire controls could scan tech rather than active sensors, which could be explained by their much tighter focus. Of course, this would probably mean that ships should know when they were being illuminated by fire control, which has other implications. The main one being that there would be a tendency to shoot all missiles at waypoints close to the target to avoid warning the target and then lock it up at the last second, which would lead to a lot more micromanagement. Firing at waypoints does give flexibility but it causes some design headaches too

An option to solve that might be that fire controls are detected like active sensors, rather than just by the targeted ship. While not as realistic it would avoid the micromanagment aspect as firing at a waypoint is no longer a way to remain undetected. Of course, it could just be left as it is now where ships don't know when they are being targetedand fire controls are undetectable. Its not as bad as it sounds because a fire control can only scan one ship at once, not every ship in range like an active sensor, so the tech scanning ship would remain secret but limited to its number of fire controls. The latter would likely not change the current casus belli situation though as active sensors would still be required to find scan targets for fire controls so the active sensor itself would likely still be seen as hostile.

Steve

[Erik L]

Not necessarily would active scanners be hostile. It's the act of locking a target with fire control that is usually seen as hostile.

Think of popular fiction and movies, especially military air warfare movies. The "missile lock" is seen as a sign of aggression, whereas radar (an active scanner) is not. That's what I am suggesting.

And definitely make fire lock be detectable. Or possibly, allow fire control suites to be brought online/offline separately from active scanners. Active scanners pose no direct threat; they cannot guide weapons. Fire control suites, however are a direct threat since they directly control weapons. And like you say, make the "tighter focus" aspect of the fire control suites gain tech data.

One thing I'd like to see is the ability to load tech data into a drone and fire it off. Similar to CD in Starfire, SLAM drones in Weber's Fury books, etc. Sucks to have a long fight that you KNOW you are going to lose, and gain a crapload of tech data, but not be able to make anything of it since the ships get blown to debris. Of course, make this a limited resource on a ship. Maybe 1 per 1000 tons or so. And if you fire off the drone, then get further updates, that drone will not have the additional information. Possibly also make memory capacity limited on the drones. Maybe 5000 rp capacity. Ideally they'd be JP capable too.

[SteveAlt (OP)]

Not necessarily would active scanners be hostile. It's the act of locking a target with fire control that is usually seen as hostile.

Think of popular fiction and movies, especially military air warfare movies. The "missile lock" is seen as a sign of aggression, whereas radar (an active scanner) is not. That's what I am suggesting.

And definitely make fire lock be detectable. Or possibly, allow fire control suites to be brought online/offline separately from active scanners. Active scanners pose no direct threat; they cannot guide weapons. Fire control suites, however are a direct threat since they directly control weapons. And like you say, make the "tighter focus" aspect of the fire control suites gain tech data.

I agree that fire control being the hostile act in reality is true and I agree that in the context of the game, allowing fire control to be the tech scanner makes a lot of sense. It is also better than the current system in terms of performance.

I also agree that being able to detect fire control makes sense. The only problem I can see is that if the lock is only detectable by the target, the aforementioned micromanagement of shooting all missiles at waypoints to avoid warning the target would become prevalent. So if we go down this route, I think perhaps the use of active fire control would be generally detectable, probably by EM sensors in the same way as they detect active sensors (although that would then add more checks to the sensor phase ).

Steve

[Erik L]

I agree. The targetted ship should not be the only one to sense the lock. Maybe since it is a focused type of scan, reduce the effective strength by 1/2 or some other fraction to account for the "tightness" of the beam.

[ShadoCat]

I like Fire Control as detectable and tech scanner.

One way to remove the waypoint issue is that unless the missile has on board sensors, it can't fire without a lock (even if it will be routed to a waypoint).  Though that has issues with non weapon missiles.  Maybe, for weapon missiles, they have to be programmed while in the launch tube (higher data rates).  So the target must be lit at the time it is programmed.  Then all the firing ship has to do is send updates.

Another option would be a tech scanner about the size of a fire control system (with range vs tech points gained and modified by scanner size).

[sloanjh]

I also agree that being able to detect fire control makes sense. The only problem I can see is that if the lock is only detectable by the target, the aforementioned micromanagement of shooting all missiles at waypoints to avoid warning the target would become prevalent. So if we go down this route, I think perhaps the use of active fire control would be generally detectable, probably by EM sensors in the same way as they detect active sensors (although that would then add more checks to the sensor phase :-)  (Although the fact that they're as smart as they are is impressive.)  A few observations on their behavior:

A)  They keep their active sensors going all the time, which makes them easy to spot, track, and avoid.  A simple sprint/drift strategy, where they move to a new location, light up the actives for a few seconds, then move to another location would make Precursor systems MUCH less safe to play in.

B)  When they lose contact with something they're chasing, they either stop or reverse course and head back to what they're guarding, even if they have a speed advantage.  This is how I've been playing tag with them - I have an active sensor that can pick them up at ~300Mkm (their active detection range for me is about 90Mkm and thermal is probably about 150), so I turn it on, let them chase me while I scan them, turn it off when they get too close, they stop, and I build the range back up and repeat.  This is a LOT of micromanagement and a bit of gaming the system - OTOH my range advantage is big and their speed advantage is small, so it can also be viewed as substituting for a much more intense cat-and-mouse with much smarter precursors.  If they didn't stop, but instead continued going to the contact point they'd be tougher to evade without a speed advantage.

C)  They all lump together.  What would be really nasty would be if e.g. 5 precursors chasing a contact spread out when they lost contact, in order to cover a range of possible evasion courses the contact might be taking (again, assuming a speed advantage for the precursors).

D)  They use a direct pursuit course, rather than lead pursuit.  This means they don't close the range as rapidly as they might.

4)  If Precursors (and presumably NPR) were more clever, then presumably it would be harder to keep them under active observation for long periods of time.  This would argue for making the rate of acquisition higher.

5)  I was frustrated that I couldn't get any information on sensor tech from Precursor listening posts.  I tried active scanning them and, as far as I could tell, got nothing (they didn't show up as active contacts, even though I had them on thermal - hmmm - how does one target them for missile strikes?).  When I invaded and captured them station with ground troops, they instantly popped down in tech to one of my standard tracking stations.  Note that this is just an observation - I understand the coding difficulties of having different tech installations; I'm just saying it would be nice to be able to get tech information (e.g. factory, mining, wealth(?)...) from captured enemy bases which were of higher tech e.g. with a Xeno team.  Maybe the thing to do is to place a ruins when an enemy population is captured, or put a "tech available" flag on populations that would be true both for ruins and for captured populations.  If you went down this road it would probably actually have to be a list of "available tech" for the population, so one couldn't get Precursor  or highly advanced tech from an NPR that was only slightly ahead of you.

6)  When my spy ships came home to Sol, sometimes they dump to Earth, sometimes to Mars.  This is awkward from a game perspective, and didn't make much sense.  I'd much rather have the tech data go to every planet (at least in the system).  This leads to the idea of a "load tech data" command for ships that would allow research points acquired on one world to be transported to other worlds.  It probably wouldn't be used a lot, but every now and then I decide I'd really rather be working on an already-started project in another system.

So I think what I'd like to see for tech acquisition is the following:

Smarter Precursors that are harder to dodge and preclude active observation for extended periods of time (unless the intel ship has both a range and speed advantage).

If I do have a range and speed advantage, the ability to give a "spy" order to an intel ship that would keep it greater than X and less than Y distance away from the nearest bad guy.  I realize this might be hard to code up.

Faster acquisition of data when spying - this is so that spying can be a strategy, rather than just an occasional bonus.  Perhaps the thing to do is to restrict the amount of data that can be acquired through spying to e.g. the first 75%, for example any points beyond 1500 for a 2000 point tech would be lost (useless).  This is essentially the way it works now, except with a "100%" limit, i.e. you can't start getting data on the next TL until you've dumped the current TL data to a world and advanced your TL.  The advantage of a 75% limit is that it counteracts the unrealistic phenomenon that I saw when I was getting active sensor tech through passive means - I went up about 5 levels in the space of a year.  From a realism point of view, this represents the effort needed to grok the data that was acquired.  In game mechanics, a 75% limit would make research 4x as easy, which translates to roughly a 2 TL boost (since cost tends to double with TL).  If you wanted a 3 TL boost then you would make the limit 87.5%.  

More ability to gain tech from populations (e.g. listening posts), either through scanning or capturing.  Capturing a populated population should allow you to gain productivity tech as well.
[/list]

I bolded the 75% limit stuff because I think it has a lot of potential to fix the things that are subtly off with the current system.  If acquisition is too fast (as for active sensors observed by passive) then you can advance too quickly in TL.  If it's too slow (as it appears to be with active scanning from my experience with the precursors), then it turns into a random "act of god" event in short encounters like combat (which spying isn't a strategy, it's just luck) and requires too much micromanagement for long encounters, because the encounters are so long.  The 75% trick solves the "too fast" problem by requiring research investment to use the data, and solves the "too slow" problem by allowing acquisition to be made much faster.  

I'm not sure (but lean against) whether the same should apply to ruins, wrecks, and/or captured populations - it seems like the data from these is different in that you've got physical artifacts to examine.  In addition, these can be made slow, since they don't require micromanagement (because you've got control of the thing being examined).  So from a game play point of view, the same problems don't show up that would require the 75% trick - the investment (from a game play sense) is in making the Xeno teams.

John

[welchbloke]

I also would like to put a vote in for fire control detectable and providing tech data.  Fire control is certainly detectable in th real world and I can't see any reason why it couldn't be read across to Aurora.

[Manekaalecto]

I will also support changing tech scanning to targeting sensors. In my opinion targeting sensors that will be:
a) gathering tech points
b) be detectable
c) considered to be very impolite (casus belli level of offense)
should work fine and be a lot of fun.

[sloanjh]

I also would like to put a vote in for fire control detectable and providing tech data.  Fire control is certainly detectable in th real world and I can't see any reason why it couldn't be read across to Aurora.

BTW, I would vote against having a lock-on be detectable by anything other than the target.  Since fire control is purportedly tight-beam, the other ships wouldn't be getting hit by the beam (unless they're supposedly seeing backscatter).  The other advantage of "target-only" detection is that it's one less O(N) detection check to do during the detection phase

John

[SteveAlt (OP)]

1)  I don't understand why making active sensor detection a non-hostile act would make people more likely to play the "waypoint" trick.  I haven't tried this, but I had assumed that I could (in 4.0b) fire my missiles at a distant waypoint and only "light up" the target once the missiles arrive.  If not, I think this should be a valid tactic from a realism point of view - I'm pretty sure that e.g. Tomahawk, AMRAAM, Harpoon, Phoenix etc. all work this way IRL.  Actually, now that I think of it, most if not all of these have onboard active terminal guidance so it's not quite the same, but the same principle should apply for semi-active homing.  In other words, I think this should already be possible, so it shouldn't be a negative on the idea of making lock-on the hostile act.

Its not making active sensor detection a non-hostile act that would make people more likely to play the "waypoint" trick, it's making fire control lock-on detectable only by the target

2)  My answer to the original question is "yes".  Most of the fun in my current game is from playing tag with the precursors, trying to get tech info from them.  I'm torn as to the rate of acquisition - when I was just passively listening to the active sensors, I was getting info pretty rapidly (i.e. a couple of weeks to get enough tech for the next level).  Now that I'm letting them chase me around while I ping them, which I've been doing non-stop for a couple of game-years now, the tech info is flowing in MUCH more slowly - I haven't gotten 1 full level of information in any system.  This might argue for making the acquisition rate a bit faster, since the only reason I'm able to keep them under active observation for years at a time is that Precursors aren't that smart (and I'm doing a lot of micromanagement - see below).

Even if we switched to fire control instead of active sensors for tech scanning, you could still play tag with the precursors in much the same way.

A)  They keep their active sensors going all the time, which makes them easy to spot, track, and avoid.  A simple sprint/drift strategy, where they move to a new location, light up the actives for a few seconds, then move to another location would make Precursor systems MUCH less safe to play in.

Precursors and NPRs will turn their sensors off sometimes. At the moment though, once they detect you on passives they will switch on actives. I agree there could be a little more intelligence in this area and perhaps they shouldn't switch on actives until within range of the thermal contact. However, for the initial version of the AI I though it would be better to engage actives in case anything else was closer that passive hadn't spotted. Once the current version is done, I will revisit the AI for the next version.

When they lose contact with something they're chasing, they either stop or reverse course and head back to what they're guarding, even if they have a speed advantage.  This is how I've been playing tag with them - I have an active sensor that can pick them up at ~300Mkm (their active detection range for me is about 90Mkm and thermal is probably about 150), so I turn it on, let them chase me while I scan them, turn it off when they get too close, they stop, and I build the range back up and repeat.  This is a LOT of micromanagement and a bit of gaming the system - OTOH my range advantage is big and their speed advantage is small, so it can also be viewed as substituting for a much more intense cat-and-mouse with much smarter precursors.  If they didn't stop, but instead continued going to the contact point they'd be tougher to evade without a speed advantage.

C)  They all lump together.  What would be really nasty would be if e.g. 5 precursors chasing a contact spread out when they lost contact, in order to cover a range of possible evasion courses the contact might be taking (again, assuming a speed advantage for the precursors).

D)  They use a direct pursuit course, rather than lead pursuit.  This means they don't close the range as rapidly as they might.

4)  If Precursors (and presumably NPR) were more clever, then presumably it would be harder to keep them under active observation for long periods of time.  This would argue for making the rate of acquisition higher.

When I get back into the AI code, I will add some more intelligence and some randomizing to Precursor behaviour.

5)  I was frustrated that I couldn't get any information on sensor tech from Precursor listening posts.  I tried active scanning them and, as far as I could tell, got nothing (they didn't show up as active contacts, even though I had them on thermal - hmmm - how does one target them for missile strikes?).  When I invaded and captured them station with ground troops, they instantly popped down in tech to one of my standard tracking stations.  Note that this is just an observation - I understand the coding difficulties of having different tech installations; I'm just saying it would be nice to be able to get tech information (e.g. factory, mining, wealth(?)...) from captured enemy bases which were of higher tech e.g. with a Xeno team.  Maybe the thing to do is to place a ruins when an enemy population is captured, or put a "tech available" flag on populations that would be true both for ruins and for captured populations.  If you went down this road it would probably actually have to be a list of "available tech" for the population, so one couldn't get Precursor  or highly advanced tech from an NPR that was only slightly ahead of you.

Although you can't get direct tech data by scanning a population, when you capture a population you have the chance of gaining data on that population's technology. Larger populations will yield a greater chance.

6)  When my spy ships came home to Sol, sometimes they dump to Earth, sometimes to Mars.  This is awkward from a game perspective, and didn't make much sense.  I'd much rather have the tech data go to every planet (at least in the system).  This leads to the idea of a "load tech data" command for ships that would allow research points acquired on one world to be transported to other worlds.  It probably wouldn't be used a lot, but every now and then I decide I'd really rather be working on an already-started project in another system.

Those two requests are unfortunately contradictory. If the ship with the tech data unloaded to both Earth and Mars, you could then load the points on Earth on to a ship and moves them to Mars, doubling the original points total ;-) should allow you to gain productivity tech as well.[/quote]
You can already get a huge amount of data when you capture a population but that is based on population size.

I bolded the 75% limit stuff because I think it has a lot of potential to fix the things that are subtly off with the current system.  If acquisition is too fast (as for active sensors observed by passive) then you can advance too quickly in TL.  If it's too slow (as it appears to be with active scanning from my experience with the precursors), then it turns into a random "act of god" event in short encounters like combat (which spying isn't a strategy, it's just luck) and requires too much micromanagement for long encounters, because the encounters are so long.  The 75% trick solves the "too fast" problem by requiring research investment to use the data, and solves the "too slow" problem by allowing acquisition to be made much faster.

It does have quite a few complications though in terms of how the data is held and when it can be used.

I'm not sure (but lean against) whether the same should apply to ruins, wrecks, and/or captured populations - it seems like the data from these is different in that you've got physical artifacts to examine.  In addition, these can be made slow, since they don't require micromanagement (because you've got control of the thing being examined).  So from a game play point of view, the same problems don't show up that would require the 75% trick - the investment (from a game play sense) is in making the Xeno teams.

Steve

[SteveAlt (OP)]

I also would like to put a vote in for fire control detectable and providing tech data.  Fire control is certainly detectable in th real world and I can't see any reason why it couldn't be read across to Aurora.

BTW, I would vote against having a lock-on be detectable by anything other than the target.  Since fire control is purportedly tight-beam, the other ships wouldn't be getting hit by the beam (unless they're supposedly seeing backscatter).  The other advantage of "target-only" detection is that it's one less O(N) detection check to do during the detection phase

I agree that it would be more realistic that only the target would detect the fire control. Unfortunately, in game-terms it leads to a micromanagement nightmare. If you are launching missiles against an enemy ship and only that ship can detect your lock, then to avoid giving yourself away the obvious thing becomes to launch the missiles at a waypoint instead of directly at the ship. You may have to retarget the missiles several times at different waypoints if the enemy fleet is changing course. Finally, you retarget the missiles again just before they arrive. You would have to do this for every ship firing missiles.

If fire controls are generally detactable, then there is no disadvantage in targeting a ship directly because even targeting a waypoint will result in detection, which means there is no need for any micromanagement.

Steve

[sloanjh]

I also would like to put a vote in for fire control detectable and providing tech data.  Fire control is certainly detectable in th real world and I can't see any reason why it couldn't be read across to Aurora.

BTW, I would vote against having a lock-on be detectable by anything other than the target.  Since fire control is purportedly tight-beam, the other ships wouldn't be getting hit by the beam (unless they're supposedly seeing backscatter).  The other advantage of "target-only" detection is that it's one less O(N) detection check to do during the detection phase

I agree that it would be more realistic that only the target would detect the fire control. Unfortunately, in game-terms it leads to a micromanagement nightmare. If you are launching missiles against an enemy ship and only that ship can detect your lock, then to avoid giving yourself away the obvious thing becomes to launch the missiles at a waypoint instead of directly at the ship. You may have to retarget the missiles several times at different waypoints if the enemy fleet is changing course. Finally, you retarget the missiles again just before they arrive. You would have to do this for every ship firing missiles.

If fire controls are generally detactable, then there is no disadvantage in targeting a ship directly because even targeting a waypoint will result in detection, which means there is no need for any micromanagement.

Steve

Aha!  Now I understand what you're saying.  I think there's a different way to get around the micromanagement - don't require a fire control lock in order to fire missiles.  If I look at the way Harpoon, Tomahawk, AMRAAM (IIRC) etc. work, they all can navigate by waypoint to a point near the target, at which point terminal search/guidance kicks in.  In other words, there's no indicator to the target that a missile launch has occured (unless the target detects the actual missiles) until very late in the missile's flight.  The fire control is only used at the very end.  This is actually similar to what goes on now in Aurora - if one target is destroyed the fire control (and associated missiles) simply switches to another, which is the moral equivalent of navigating the associated missiles to the neighborhood of the second target using waypoints, then doing terminal guidance with the fire control radar.

The yukky part that I see here is some sort of minimum time requirement that the target be illuminated - otherwise you could just light it up at the very end and the target would never know what hit it.  OTOH, that's essentially what happens right now (without detection of fire control) - just being detected by an active search radar doesn't indicate whether you're targetted by missiles which are in flight, and a target only has to be illuminated by fire control for 5 seconds in order to be hit with redirected missiles.  So the minimal change would be to allow fire control to be used in intel mode (which would be detectable by the target and last for long periods of time), or to automatically switch on and be detected during terminal guidance.

John

[sloanjh]

Its not making active sensor detection a non-hostile act that would make people more likely to play the "waypoint" trick, it's making fire control lock-on detectable only by the target

See preceding post.

2)  My answer to the original question is "yes".  Most of the fun in my current game is from playing tag with the precursors, trying to get tech info from them.  I'm torn as to the rate of acquisition - when I was just passively listening to the active sensors, I was getting info pretty rapidly (i.e. a couple of weeks to get enough tech for the next level).  Now that I'm letting them chase me around while I ping them, which I've been doing non-stop for a couple of game-years now, the tech info is flowing in MUCH more slowly - I haven't gotten 1 full level of information in any system.  This might argue for making the acquisition rate a bit faster, since the only reason I'm able to keep them under active observation for years at a time is that Precursors aren't that smart (and I'm doing a lot of micromanagement - see below).

Even if we switched to fire control instead of active sensors for tech scanning, you could still play tag with the precursors in much the same way.

Agreed.  My observation was that playing tag for years at a time leads to a lot of micromanagement (that would be handled by the commander on the scene, but the AI isn't up to it), which in turn is a drag on the quick progress of the game.  So the argument is that the useful episodes of tag should be much shorter (weeks or months of game time, rather than years), so that "tag" runs on roughly (i.e. within an order of magnitude or so) of the time-scale of a battle, i.e. it's a game within the game (just like battles are).  So the trick is "how do I make the micro-managed part of spying be on timescales of weeks or months while keeping the tech level advances at timescales of months or years" - that's what the 75% trick addresses.

A)  They keep their active sensors going all the time, which makes them easy to spot, track, and avoid.  A simple sprint/drift strategy, where they move to a new location, light up the actives for a few seconds, then move to another location would make Precursor systems MUCH less safe to play in.

Precursors and NPRs will turn their sensors off sometimes. At the moment though, once they detect you on passives they will switch on actives. I agree there could be a little more intelligence in this area and perhaps they shouldn't switch on actives until within range of the thermal contact. However, for the initial version of the AI I though it would be better to engage actives in case anything else was closer that passive hadn't spotted. Once the current version is done, I will revisit the AI for the next version.

Sorry - I didn't mean for my comments to be a slam on existing Precursor behavior - I think they both rock and am all in favor of your initial implementation.  The intent was to give you info for the next round of AI improvement.  My experience is that I've seen individual precursors turn off their actives, but since they don't move while the actives are off they're still pretty easy to avoid.

5)  I was frustrated that I couldn't get any information on sensor tech from Precursor listening posts.  I tried active scanning them and, as far as I could tell, got nothing (they didn't show up as active contacts, even though I had them on thermal - hmmm - how does one target them for missile strikes?).  When I invaded and captured them station with ground troops, they instantly popped down in tech to one of my standard tracking stations.  Note that this is just an observation - I understand the coding difficulties of having different tech installations; I'm just saying it would be nice to be able to get tech information (e.g. factory, mining, wealth(?)...) from captured enemy bases which were of higher tech e.g. with a Xeno team.  Maybe the thing to do is to place a ruins when an enemy population is captured, or put a "tech available" flag on populations that would be true both for ruins and for captured populations.  If you went down this road it would probably actually have to be a list of "available tech" for the population, so one couldn't get Precursor  or highly advanced tech from an NPR that was only slightly ahead of you.

Although you can't get direct tech data by scanning a population, when you capture a population you have the chance of gaining data on that population's technology. Larger populations will yield a greater chance.

Oops - my bad.  I've only captured Precursor outposts, and didn't have any artifacts to examine.

6)  When my spy ships came home to Sol, sometimes they dump to Earth, sometimes to Mars.  This is awkward from a game perspective, and didn't make much sense.  I'd much rather have the tech data go to every planet (at least in the system).  This leads to the idea of a "load tech data" command for ships that would allow research points acquired on one world to be transported to other worlds.  It probably wouldn't be used a lot, but every now and then I decide I'd really rather be working on an already-started project in another system.

Those two requests are unfortunately contradictory. If the ship with the tech data unloaded to both Earth and Mars, you could then load the points on Earth on to a ship and moves them to Mars, doubling the original points total :-)

The real benefit, however, comes after a few TL.  Lets say you've been diligently spying on the precursors, and you're up to strength 16 (caveat - I'm making these levels/costs up), which costs 32,000 points, that strength 24 costs 64,000 points, and that your best research planet can do 8000 points/year on sensors.  As it stands today, you can spend a few weeks listening to precursors broadcast active sensors, pick up all 64,000 points, and advance a TL in the space of a few months (most of which is spent in travel time to the precursor system) - this is what happened in my current game.  With the 75% idea, even if you had only spend a few days (or even hours) listening, it would still have taken a full year of your best research planet's time to gain strength 16, and will take two years to gain strength 24.  This is why I'm proposing that acquisition be a lot faster (to cut down on micromanagement during games of tag) - it's not harmful to balance because once you've gained a couple of levels quickly, it becomes impractical to advance any further until you've upped your research base.  The big investment would be in resources would be building the spy ships, and in game time would be doing the last 25% of research, rather than in the act of spying.

More ability to gain tech from populations (e.g. listening posts), either through scanning or capturing.  Capturing a populated population :-)

John