Make it easier to research specific techs

Hmmm.... That doesn't map cleanly to GC2. It could have to GC1, and does to Civ3 (haven't played Civ4, so I don't know for sure). First, if it's just general advice, the Civ line (and GC1) use a (possibly) multiple prerequisite tech tree. GC2 has no multiple prerequisiste techs and only a few branches, but the tech lines are mostly linear.

Another problem is, for any given ship design, there's a list of required techs. I'm not talking tech X plus its its prerequisites, I'm saying "ship design has engine X, therefore requires tech Xa. Has sensors Y, therefore requires tech Ya." etc. To make matters worse, it's not like we're only using predefined ships. That's what you had in GC1, in Civ3, and probably Civ4 for that matter. So while one design for a Battleship may require Harpoon III, another one may require Mass Drivers III. In Civ4 the advisor could say "we need to go this way to get to the next military unit" because there aren't multiple paths like this. Three different empires could have powerful militaries with one never researching lasers, one never researching mass drivers, and one never researching missiles. The kind of advisor you're talking about couldn't deal with this kind of situation without asking more questions about the players strategy and such.

The closest I can see to an advisor would be adding more tabs to the shipyard/ship design screens. A tab for "predesigned ships that we don't have the tech for" on the starport screen, and then some way to show the user the required techs for that ship that they don't have. Then, for the DIY types, a tab on the ship design screen for "components I don't have the tech for, and what tech would be required" with basic stats so the user could tell if component X is a powerful weapon but expensive, cheap but not so expensive, etc.

Does this make sense?

Well, if you could just click on a "Goal" tech in the tech screen, so that you'd automatically follow the research path to get that goal tech, it could save the user some Researching MM.

I'd suggest adding a display line in the Research screen that showed what your "Goal" tech was (when going up one step, the currently researching tech == Goal tech), so that you could look and see for those users like me, that might forget that we had a goal tech set.

I do think it would be a nice feature if the game told me what tech I was missing, rather then "Allows Fighters (with 1 more tech)". That would be a lot more useful then the current "Allows" feature.

Now, when we finally get that ship library manager in-game, we will need a list of the techs that we don't have to enable the constuction of our saved ships, as suggested by Popup Target.

Star Pilot, the "Goal" tech sounds reasonable if you know the tech you want, and is the same thing Civ3 did. But I don't think it's what the OP was asking for since he didn't know which techs he needs.

Yeah, having a link in the tech screen to the ships that a certain tech enable, and that link pops up a window showing the ship stats and what other missing techs you'll need to make the ship. Maybe even color-code the links as to whether or not this is the only tech that is needed for that ship.

Another problem is, for any given ship design, there's a list of required techs. I'm not talking tech X plus its its prerequisites, I'm saying "ship design has engine X, therefore requires tech Xa. Has sensors Y, therefore requires tech Ya." etc. To make matters worse, it's not like we're only using predefined ships. That's what you had in GC1, in Civ3, and probably Civ4 for that matter. So while one design for a Battleship may require Harpoon III, another one may require Mass Drivers III. In Civ4 the advisor could say "we need to go this way to get to the next military unit" because there aren't multiple paths like this. Three different empires could have powerful militaries with one never researching lasers, one never researching mass drivers, and one never researching missiles. The kind of advisor you're talking about couldn't deal with this kind of situation without asking more questions about the players strategy and such.

I don't understand really the difficulty you're seeing. I'd imagine this could easily be supported by a graph algorithm. The tech tree is a graph. The ship you want can be thought of as a tech in itself, dependent on the techs of all its components. Then, you can start a breadth first search through the tech tree, and report to the user the first tech that hasn't been explored. I don't suggest depth first search because it might lead to the most expensive techs first, which may not be in the user's best interest. (On the other hand, it would probably lead to techs that are most likely to be useful for trading, so it might be a good thing after all.)

And don't forget, that even if you have all required techs, you may not able to "build" the targeted ship if you are missing some miniaturization level

I didn't explain that well. The problem really isn't that in in GC1, Civ3, and similar, there was a one-to-one correspondance between a battleship and the tech required for the battleship. and in GC2, there are multiple tech requirements.

The problem is, there are thousands of ships that could be called a battleship. There are thousands of ships that could be called a scout, or a survey vessel, or whatever have you. This makes it hard to say "Show me the techs I should research for battleship."

What's the definition of a battleship? Let's say that a battleship is a medium hull with a reasonable amount of offense and defense, enough range so that it can reach nearby enemy stars, and enough speed that it won't take forever to get there.

Let's see, since we need at least one engine, that means that we have 14 levels of engine we can put on it, assuming that we stick to a single engine. Each of those 14 levels would have different tech requirements.

Weapons: There's approximately 70 types of weapons.

Defenses: There's approximately 54 types of defenses.

Life support: There's 5 types of life support, not counting none.

Sensors: 6 types of sensors.

So, assuming that we only go for one of each, we have a total so far of 14*70*54*5*6, or 158760 (I think, did the math in my head) combinations so far. And all that is assuming that we went with one of each component. On a medium hull, we can probably fit more than one of some of those components, and if we've got lots of miniaturization, the number goes much higher. Now, most of those combinations aren't going to be seen, because people tend to level somewhat equally through the tech tree, but there's still enough valid and reasonable combinations that the numbers are quite large.

So, which of those thousands of battleships do you want to aim for?

Just at random, here's two ships that could both be called an early to mid-game missile/point defense battleship:

Medium hull, 3 Harpoon IIIs, one ECM III, a Warp III engine, two basic life support, and two sensor 2.

Medium Hull, 2 Harpoon IVs, 2 Smart Chaff, a Warp V engine, one advance life support, and one sensor 3.

One of these will probably require more miniaturization than the other, both require mildly different tech levels in several areas, but both are basically the same concept, just expressed with different technology at hand.

So, if you want something that tells you what tech you need to get a certain ship, that can be done, and that's what I described. What you need to understand though, is that games that think "dozens of types of units are a lot" are fish in a water trough, we're in the ocean here. Even if the devs provide 100 different battleships, odds are that none of them are going to be just right for the techs that you have in 90% of the cases.

The other thing that was suggested was to have an advisor that you could say "focus research on millitary" and it would pick relevant techs. Two problems there. First, it would need to know where you want to go. If you're expecting to go to war with a race using beam attack ships, the advisor would have to know this in order to make sure you researched shield defenses. In Civ3, there weren't a lot of parallel military tech paths like in GC2. It's not like you could focus research on infantry OR cavalry OR tanks. Because of the multiple prerequisites for techs, you'd have to go through contortions not to eventually get all the military units.

The second part is that the advisor would have to be sharp enough to know that if you have techs X, Y, Z, it can build a good ship, but if it upgrades X, it gets a different ship and if it upgrades Y or Z, still different ships, and it has to be able to understand when each of those different ships would be better. It would also have to know if you're planning on staying ahead technologically and using small ships, or if you've researched as far as you're going to in the short term, so will more likely be smashing the enemy with bigger ships.

In my opinion, doing something like the first makes sense provided we have a large library of ship designs and a reasonable way to select one we want from them. However, it's not critical.

The second part is an unworkable crutch. Players that used it would get more frustrated at loosing often than the ones that got frustrated learning how the system works, in my opinion.

I think it would make sense to know for a particular 'core' ship to see what tech is missing to be able to build it.

For GC1 i used to have all the tech / ships on one big diagram and would follow the lines back to what tech i needed to get in order to build the ship i wanted.

For GC2 i noticed that the tech tree shows me that in order to build my own designs from previous games i am missing some stuff i did research in that previous game but not what is missing so i am looking like crazy to find the missing tech.

What would make this very usefull is to know what is missing as stated in one of the previous posts instead of saying that something is missing

It would be great to look at a particular standard design or one created by me and get a list of tech missing needed to build this particular ship or telling me the next tech i need to research or obtain to move up the tech tree to be able to build it.

What about each design you have showing the tech level required for each component or the number of tech levels still needed (maybe color coded, so green = OK, yellow = 1 short, red = 2 or more levels short) per component, plus a simple check to see if you still need additional miniaturization? That should not be too problematic ?
Or is that part of that legendary ship-library-manager ?