Technology fields

Chemistry

Armor, Fueld, Missiles, some production and pollution cleanup bonuses.

Sociology

Provides various military, diplomatic, assimilation and domestic bonuses. This field is mostly linear in the original game.

Technologies

Advanced Damage Control

All your ships are automatically fully repaired after each battle. Brought by sparky.

Evolutionary Mutation

Upon acquiring this technology the player receives extra 4 picks and has a chance to spend all remaining picks on adding a new positive traits or removing a negative ones. The mutation rules are:

  1. You can’t deselect positive traits your race has been created with to gain more picks. You can only select new positive traits or upgrade existing ones, e.g. replace +25 attack with +50 attack.

  2. You can’t select new negative traits to gain more picks. You can only deselect exisiting negative traits or upgrade them, e.g. replace -10 spying with +10 spying.

  3. If you have a leftover points from the initial race customization, you can spend them.

  4. You have an option of not spending any points.

  5. You can select new positive traits or deselect negative traits, say -10% attack with the cost of -2 can be deselected with 2 more points remaining to spend.

  6. The mutation takes effect instantly and may affect the combat right away if combat-related traits have been changed. This is an 1.40 change from classic and gradually grew into a popular late game tactical trick. For this reason 1.50 left it in.

Bugs

All bugs below have been fixed in 1.50.

  • Sometimes selecting option A would automatically deselect conflicting option B, then the user could deselect A and end up with the initial race with the only difference of B being deselected. This effectively breaks rule 1. For example you have lithovore, on mutation you select Cybernetic for 4 points, Lithovore automatically deselect releasing 10 points, then you also deselect cybernetic for the total of 14 points you can spend on unrelated abilities. In 1.50 indirect deselection of an option is forbidden, in the example selecting Cybernetic won’t work.

  • Some valid options would sometimes become unclickable due to a GUI bug.

  • The mutation could produce a network multiplayer desync in 1.40 due to changes to the end of turn calculations.