That's what I was saying. But, for example, a huge hull in this way would need A) the normal massive scale building to unlock it, and
warp drive V (for instance). If I just set one of them as a prereq tech, then either someone can just rush warp drive V to get a huge hull without massive scale, or someone can rush massive to get warp drive V without warp drive V itself.
I was thinking of having it set up so that faster hulls are unlocked in the tree only after the base hull has been, and in the normal engine order, but that would increase the overall tech cost.
But then I tested two prerequisite techs, for lack of anything better to do, and it works. I was, to be honest, shocked-but pleased. I'm unsure if three will work, but based on the fact that two does, my guess would be yes. And it doesn't unlock until you have both of them, which is fantastic.
At first it seemed like it wasn't working, as I loaded a saved game and attempted to research from there. I'm not sure what led me to believe that was the problem, but I fired up a new game and it worked perfectly. So apparently the game saves a copy of the data within the save file itself, which is probably a good thing, to avoid phantom techs and things like that, but it did throw me off initially.
Which brings me back to my original question of whether or not the AI will actually use the hulls-more to the point, will it recognize that a hull with say speed 5 is superior to a hull with speed 1 after it has unlocked it? And it also re-raises my concern that this way of doing it will clutter up the hull selection screen, but I'm not sure there's a good way around that.
I guess the engine techs could all just be made to increase speed, and not actually unlock anything at all. I'm not sure how I'd fix the ship cost difference, though.
And zarguon, I'm with you on that. There are just so many interesting things that can be done with one-only modules, but most would be far too overpowered if there was no limit.
