i tend to agree. singularity drivers is another weapon that seems out of step with it's place in the tree.

i've been having a good look at the weapons/defence costs with a view to making a more compressed tech tree, and ion beams stand out in terms of research cost. it's interesting - the cost weighting of weapons techs is slanted quite heavily in favour of beam weapons, particularly for the evil races. mass drivers and missiles don't have anywhere near the same ethical attention, being fairly flat for all races, and more expensive to research. there's also some 'padding' techs like photonic torp III, that don't have any actual weapon to build, and also the issue, reported before, where some races don't have access to ethical choice weapons.

i've been looking at flattening out the costs, relying instead on racial modifiers to get races there earlier or later. however, i've noticed that i can't add an existing default tech to a race's tech tree with the tech editor?? am i missing something?