Reverse Engineering

Situation:

A player has either-

• Captured/traded for an enemy's system, which contains one or more system improvements belonging to a technology the player does not possess
• Captured (through boarding pods)/bought (through market)/acquired (as event loot) a ship which belongs to a tech tier (Attacker, Carrier, etc.) the player does not possess, and/or has modules belonging to a technology the player does not possess

This situation should provide some benefit to the player's research as the unknown technologies are reverse engineered. As an initial suggestion, this could take the form of:

• A continuous, small "independent" boost to researching the associated technologies (regardless of what the player is actively researching)
• Some percentage boost to researching the associated technologies while the player is actually researching them
• A larger, either flat one-time increase or timed percentage boost, to researching the associated technologies at the cost of destroying the relevant ship/system improvement.

The process of reverse engineering could itself be a low- to mid-tier technology, maybe enabling the building of a system improvement to bring captured ships to/build at newly conquered systems.

This provides a better way forward for warmongering empires, as they (like many historical empires) enhance themselves with the technologies of those they conquer, and makes them more of a continuous threat throughout the game as they should no longer be severely outclassed tech-wise by the surviving endgame tall empires. On the flip side, other empires may be incentivized to slash and burn their own systems rather than grant the bonus to an invading force, or fight all the harder to keep the system.

It also, depending on implementation, provides a way other than trade for the "completionist" scientists to grab all the technologies, including the mutually exclusive ones.

Finally, it would add an extra layer of thought to selling ships on the market; doing so may be accidentally aiding the research of enemy empires.