KungFuKenobi

Oh I get it. I think the game assumes "CanBeStolen 1", so only the few techs where the tag would be 0 have a tag for CanBeStolen. That would explain why I didn't find it earlier. Thanks for pointing this out. :) I'll make the changes to TechTree.xml, and see what happens. Setting all techs to 0 will probably disable spies stealing too, but I can live with that as a mod. If this is a good enough idea to add to the setup screen, it might be necessary to use a different check after battle

I already poked through the XML files, but didn't turn up anything promising.

Is there a way to mod this? I find that recovering techs after battle can really destabilize the whole research process. This is especially true in large galaxies with lots of worlds, where a relatively small section of conflict going badly for one side could result in a huge tech jump for the other. It also means more time spent bulking up to prevent tug-of-war battles that could easily homogenize our respective tech trees. Thing is, I LIKE that kind of rough stuff, but I wou