How to control the drop rate of techs?

[Mordachai]

I have no idea where to start looking on this...

I hate how friggin' every single game gives me the "rare!" crystal plating 2. And all of the green, yellow, and blue shard throwers.

Basically, every single game gives me better tech faster by cleaning up from the local critters than my scientists can come up with on their own.

Which would be fine... for some games. If it felt interesting or as a boon. Instead, it's "why bother with any other tech, I'll always get a boost through rummaging through junk."

Anyway - I'm adding expanded techs based on crystal armor and regenerative armor - but I don't !@$#!@# want them to appear EVERY single game.

So how does Stellaris control whether and how much gain you get on techs when you analyze space debris?

Is it possible to require that you have researched a lower tech completely before being given partial research into techs beyond? (or, can I at least make it impossible to complete those research paths unless you first do the earlier research? I assume that this last one is a simple matter of making the later techs have the earlier as prereqs).

 

[Foraven]

From what i understand of the code, you get a % of the tech research for each components that were on the destroyed ship. The more of it, the more research given. As far as i can tell, it's not chance based, you get the tech if you salvage a ship that has the tech on it.

 

[Mordachai]

so the way to reduce occurrence of regenerative armor is to either remove it from creatures in the game, or to make the creatures far more rare, or make them mean as hell so you can't go round blowing them to dust early on...?

 

[Foraven]

so the way to reduce occurrence of regenerative armor is to either remove it from creatures in the game, or to make the creatures far more rare, or make them mean as hell so you can't go round blowing them to dust early on...?

Yep, something along those lines. It's the same problem we have with the Fallen Empires; if you manage to blow some up and salvage, you can easily get all their tech. They should make it much harder to salvage tech, it's too easy right now to catch up with everyone else so long as you can blow up some of their ships...

 

[Velorian]

You can mark the tech as unsalvageable like the FTL techs.

I'm not sure there actually is a way for it to randomly enter the tech tree though so you should probably edit that it.

Also I've never researched the Shard Throwers, they seem really, really bad. The best ones are barely better than start tech and it's a dead end.