Thanks - don't custom built ships fall under tech prequisites as well though? After playing a few standalone games it seems to take quite awhile before you can start building any but the most basic ships.

thanks - that is the answer I was looking for. Out of curiousity though is there any way to tell what the prerequisites are for each ship? GC2 seems like a great game so far but the tech tree should have better details as to how each tech relates to others.

You can click on the tech tree and it will tell you if that tech is a requisite for a speciic type of ship plus what the other required techs are. For example if you click on the tech "photon torpedo" it will tell you that it is one of the techs needed for the shiptype "Paladin" as well as large scale building, point defense etc. If you create your own ship design and save it as a template that also appears when you click on one of the needed techs. You can do this even if the tech is far beyond your current level.

Plus, it takes a while for the core ships to adjust to shifted priorities.

I like that if I manually update a design, that all the planets building the old design switch to the new design, so I can get a similar effect while having better control over what my ships can do.