quote:
Originally posted by Wardad:
There may be a enabling condition that has to be met before you can build with it. ex: Armor needs chemistry. Some weapons can only be built if you have the needed Racial trait.
I agree with the Racial trait comment; if you don't have the right racial trait, you don't get the racial techs from analyzing. However, you can get tech levels in areas you haven't researched the prerequisites for; but you won't be able to advance research in that area on your own until you research the prerequisite. I got phased weapons that way in a pre-Gold game. After capturing 3 enemy ships & analyzing each one separately, I gained 3 levels of phased weapons, even though I hadn't researched Physics 2 (?) yet. But phased weapons didn't show up as a choice in my research queue until I finished Physics 2.
I think one of the modders used this quirk & changed racial techs so that certain racial-tech components could be captured and used by other races, even though they couldn't research the tech themselves.