you realy think it wasn't considered by developers when they were designing the game? it would be way too powerful, nobody would give ships to noone because of that, noone would even trade ships becaouse of that, and cultural victory would be too popular, other aspects of the game would become mariginalised, some people would not even research technologies that their neigbor have etc...

also lots of monetary costs for the reasurch and other civs being more wary of giving you ships that have higher tech than yours, and a chance of failure after all that money spent and a ship taken apart would also be some costs that could be used to balance a feature like this though i dont think it would add too much fun to it just be interesting

Tasty Gerbil - I think the idea is a great one. I think the reverse engineering idea by Pyrion is an even better one. The hitch might be that the A.I. would probably need to be tweaked in order to make ship trading be worth more because of this tech gain potential, and "gift giving" would probably be more rare than I am betting it already is (unless player initiated of course) . But great ideas are what Brad is looking for, so keep throwing them out there.

In MOO2 you can gain tech from captured ships when you scrap them. I'm sure the devs know this as they talk about MOO2 all the time. I agree that they've probably thought of it, maybe even implemented it, but couldn't balance it.

For my part I think it would balance alright if you could decomission the ship, and then have a random chance of gaining a random tech that was involved in the construction of that ship. If the ship has a high level mass driver tech in it, and you're focused on missiles or beams, if you randomly get the MD tech as your bonus, then you get an increase in YOUR level of mass driver, not a copy of the other player's tech. So if they had a +5 MD weapon and you've only researched +1 MD weapons, you might get a +2 MD tech out of it.

But you have to scrap the ship, and that's the key part. You could take it a step further and make scrapping a ship for tech and scrapping a ship for money separate options...so you might scrap ships and not get anything out of it.

Yes one thing GC2 has going for it is very competent AI.

Personally, I don't think this is something I'd want. If you really want the tech from your neighbor go spy on him/her. Or you can trade for it.

I thought espionage spending already did that, but as a longer term effort.