dont change it thats a great feature! i love that feature i dont want it to be changed if any thing it should be improved so you get all the techs in between your current tech and that one! its not that you wouldnt understand the tech just because you have to research to get it. if you went back in time and gave the northern guys in the civil war AK 47's they wouldnt go "oh my god i cant figure out how to put this long "clip" as you call it into the slot, they would asom (sorry cant spell ) it was a new gun. my point is you would understand it.there should be a feature to take care of getting far advanced techs but if you want to, get any random tech

It doesn't make sense to be able to immediately build a ship with a highly advanced technology that you are far, far away from researching yourself. I can understand getting it and keeping it until you have researched the necessary technologies to understand it (i.e. research everything elading up to it and you can use it without spending any research points for it), or only being able to capture techs you can comprehend (i.e. can research now, or 1 step beyond what you can research now, and also get the prerequisite free).

Yeah you should get a tech that u can research and only if there are no such techs it should pick arandom one ( or none) great solution !!!

Cavemen, for example, didn't understand the mechanics involved with gravity, but knew that driving a bunch of mammoths off of a cliff onto a spike pit killed them

Point granted Marcathonas but give a caveman a submarine or a fighter plane and I wonder how useful they would find it. Or, if we on Earth captured any basic ship from Gal Civ, I doubt we would be able to use and understand it completly from the moment we captured it, instead it would give us new research ideas etc.
Enigma's point about an AK-47 in the civil war - yes a guy could use it but when it ran out of ammo - they wouldn't have the technology to make more - it would simply represent a target for them to research towards.

However, at the end of the day, gameplay is what is important and it does have a huge huge affect- if I get doomray from the DL's first planet, then the game is going to be far far easier than if I dont. It encourages me to concede weak planets so that hopefully I can recapture them easily and get a mega tech.
Or remove all the population off a load of worlds in transports - keep the transports around the planets - give them all to an advanced ai and then recapture them all straight away and probably netting me a lot of valuable techs in the process.

Being able to get any tech introduces a random variable which can be exremely powerful. Random events are great and should impact the game but only to a certain extent. The random tech can turn into a cheese factor/'tactic'

This is something with quite a precedent in sci-fi in general - in Stargate SG-1 the humans often use Goa'uld / Asgard technology without knowing how it works. That doesn't prevent them from being able to use it though, just means that they can't really use it to it's full potential.

In terms of game balance, IMO it's not really that big a problem (if you see it as that) except in the campaign. In sandbox mode, if someone is far enough ahead of you in tech for you to be stealing something massively advanced you're probably getting your ass handed to you in pretty short order anyway.

Point granted Marcathonas but give a caveman a submarine or a fighter plane and I wonder how useful they would find it. Or, if we on Earth captured any basic ship from Gal Civ, I doubt we would be able to use and understand it completly from the moment we captured it, instead it would give us new research ideas etc. Enigma's point about an AK-47 in the civil war - yes a guy could use it but when it ran out of ammo - they wouldn't have the technology to make more - it would simply represent a target for them to research towards.

True, but remember 2 things. One is that if you gave the cavemen a new type of weapon (like, as you said, a plane) they wouldn't have a clue. But Doom Ray is merely a powerful beam weaepon. In the campaign the Terrans know how beam weapons work. They also have infinite ammo in the form of limitless energy via cold fusion. So if you gave the civil war fighter a warehouse of ammo, showed him how the clip worked, and went away, he'd be able to use it all. Same basic idea here.

Don't forget that at the end of every campaign round you lose the tech anyway. And I've never used it in DL on parade, since I always seem to have researched better weapons on a different tree (I normally play slow tech but for DL I switch it to fast)

Actually, it makes sense to be able to steal a technology and not know the preceding techs. I can give an example that actually relates to the spoils of war!

By World War II, the the best way to record a message for use of propaganda was by using a sort of strip of metal that is then used for recording. But this form of recording left its message unclear and a magnetized white noise. By the end of the war, a model of a new magnetophone was stolen by a soldier whos name I'm forgetting. It uses tape rather than metal, coats the tape with iron oxide, and is then prerecorded in order to minimize the white noise. Well the item was sold to the US who proceded to reproduce copies of the "futuristic technologies" of the Germans. They would able to then pick up from the magnetophone and create tape recorders, cds, then the almighty iPod.

I disagree. If you capture a planet that has records of research, blueprints, etc --- then why not be able to acquire the technology. The way it is currently implemented makes perfect sense.

As for stealing technologies, it isn't a 100% sure-fire. And even if you steal one, what are the chances of jumping from Laser I to Doom Ray considering all the extra technologies within the line heck or even the whole tech tree. Also, it wouldn't be really unbalancing. In order to steal that tech, you needed an enemy that already had Doom Ray, you're merely jumping to their height.

BUT as for building production, I would like to point out the possibility of manipulating the superior enemy by giving him a planet, taking it back, with high end buildings being built. I'm alright with using this technique once or twice, but I would like to suggest for the AI to catch onto this technique, only update a hazardous, by hazardous I mean REALLY hazardous, planet once it has been sufficiently protected. And, I would even give props if all races, or maybe just evil, were to perform a "scorched earth" technique on hazardous planets! Which means, if the computer knows a superior race is assembling transports against a planet, the AI will deconstruct ALL improvements on the planet, I would love this game even more for the shrewdness of the action.

Anyway back to the subject, no I think the tech stealing is good, the idea of give and take I consider a legit strategy but so long as the AI catch on to the strategy, maybe even perform it themselves.

I just dont think any single random event should have the ability to completly and utterly change the whole game.
Also it makes the game too easy and stops weapon specialisation being as important - later on in the game, you will more than likely have stolen high techs for all weapon and shield types.