Yeah, that's a fair point. I just finished a playthrough with it myself and realized that it was a bit brutal. Well, ok, it was not brutal at all and completely OP right up until behemoth biters started spawning, then 200 HP shields were paper thin (partly because I also have biter collision turned off; so all the spitters focus-fire one turret and nuke it under a barrage of ~4000 dmg).
I see the solution I like: the first order of magnutide ramps up to needing all science packs (say you have 5 steps per OOM, then rank 1 would take red+green, rank 2 RGBlack, 3 RGBBlue, 4 RGBBP, 5 RGBBPGold, then 6+ would all take white science. The problem is how I write that algorithm for step sizes < 5 and > 5. Ugh. Annoying.
And then I wouldn't be able to have it be an upgrade skill, I'd have to define multiple research techs. Not hard, just...:/ TBH: if you need more shielding, just change the default shield HP until you can research it. You could totally start with 200, raise it to 1000, then lower it back to 200 once you'd gotten a few researches under your belt. Thinking about it, I don't know whether that's better or worse than me taking away some of the utility from the 'steps per order of magnitude'.
hah. All I really wanted was to make a shield HP/recharge scale that kept pace with power creep. That was the entire goal. Too smart is dumb?
