Why are there fewer tech levels in the Balance Mod?
There are a number of reasons why the Balance Mod reduced the overall number of tech levels. The reasons included balancing requirements, gameplay benefits, increasing play-style variety and AI development. Keeping facilities and components in scale with each other over 100 tech levels is difficult. For example, a Depleted Uranium Cannon (DUC) in the standard game does 20 damage at level 1 and 515 damage at level 100 – a 25x increase. However, other game elements like component/facility/population structure does not follow a similar increase and the effect of the DUC becomes unbalanced to other game elements. The general rule of thumb when I revised the tech tree for the Balance Mod was for an item to approximately double in its output/ability from their lowest to highest tech level – or at least stay in step with a counter item. This helps keeps various game elements in equilibrium with each other. In the standard data files, most tech areas have very low base costs and relatively sma
