Indeed. It doesn't necessarily make sense, and your only recourse if it's a problem is to house rule it. On the plus side, you can save the money. :) The Remade are superior enough as it is!

You can also invest less in your Apts to start, but that can leave you more reliant on your morph.

What you're asking is essentially how long it would take for an already posthuman being to go recursive in its self-improvement. Not really an easy answer there. Problem is, any being born a transhuman is working to self-improve using a very old, very poorly made biological system. An entity from a biological background, therefore, be they transhuman, uplift, or otherwise, must work within this framework of self-modification. Typically, such self-modification leads to insanity. As such, trying to push yourself to beyond this level might take years, decades, or even centuries of difficult and mind-numbing work. Meanwhile, entities such as AGIs have an advantage in this department. They are created from code and that code can be modified with significantly more ease than something emulating a biological brain. Problem is, for AGIs, they've all been built to prevent just such a thing; no-one wants another seed AI on their hands. So, really, there's no satisfying answer I can give you in that regard. In game terms, it's a plot device. Someone who wants to go super-intelligence would be better off isolating themselves in the Oort Cloud, building a few dozen or hundred or thousand servers, and creating a seed AI whose sole purpose is to develop designs for improving its creators capacity for thought.

Not to mention if you went recursive, Firewall would hunt you down. "Kill it with fire!" Of course, if you are going for a post human game, then more power to you, good luck =)

The Prometheans control Firewall, but neither openly nor perfectly. They are only known of to a very select few. Hence, the only experience most Firewall operatives have with seed AIs is the TITANs, so they're likely going to be rather a cautious bunch, and it'd not surprise me for them to disobey orders if they see a threat they believe is too dangerous to leave alone. As for the possibility to push transhumanity further, it's actually mentioned in Gatecrashing that one is trying to build a Jupiter Brain to allow itself to develop even further, resulting in an intelligence to make others seem infantile by comparison. If you want to toy with posthuman capabilities, though, just be ready for what you're getting yourself into. While the idea of being an indestructible, super-intelligent entity, whose form is composed of a sentient nanite cloud and who can adapt against any obstacle in a matter of minutes and survive in any environment, is undeniably awesome, remember that Eclipse Phase is a game. If you want to keep it going and keep your range of conflict options open, always remember that the more powerful someone is, the less that opposes them. If your characters are Psi Epsilon asyncs, who can hurl an enemy into the air and disable their electronics with a thought, the number of effective challenges diminish significantly. That said... Hmmm... That's a thought for a whole new thread.

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I think the system poorly attempts to describe the game effects of high level stats, its not just simply having a higher number, it should represent a totally different plateu and capacity to do things people who are merely enchanced or even flats cant even think of let alone attempt.

It does this pretty well actually. Take two auto mechanics with a skill of 98 The cog 5 mechanic spent 131 rez points to achieve his masterful ability to fix a car. The Cog 40 mechanic spent 96 rez points to achieve the same level of expertise, and then had 35 points left to spend getting his doctorate in mechanical engineering, (skill 60, 20 rez), and also has a masters degree in mathmatics (skill 55, 15 rez) Aptitude is not trivial but it doesn't measure potential the way that argument would indicate , Rez measures potential. Alone, aptitude doesn't mean much in real world potential and this is reflected in the game and the example I posted above. There are plenty of extremely bright people who are essentially worthless because their major study in life is; (pick a major sport), PETA, or hiding in mom's basement playing RPGs. High Cog also doesn't have a very close correlation to genius. I chose auto mechanics in my example because it is a Cog skill. Yet, I feel it's a safe bet that a very low percentage of the very intelligent people here are in any way capable auto mechanics. However, my half-tard redneck cousin is an actual Automotive Genius. Game stats and their range more accurately describe the SOTA contemporary to the setting. It's probably not reasonable to compare Galileo to Hawking or Davinci to Einstein. A cog stat of 40 indicates that a character who is ALSO highly motivated and obsessively peruses a line of reasoning has a chance to advance the SOTA in that field. However that character has only the knowledge current up to his epoc to work with so it's unlikely that character will have a major breakthrough. Being very smart is not an indicator of success. There are plenty of people just as smart as Einstein, Oppenheimer, Hawking, Galileo, Davincci who we've never heard of. Don't put too much emphasis on aptitudes, there are many other factors that make both characters and people capable of amazing feats.

Decivre is due credit for his strength rule. It's solid and should be included as standard. I see what you're saying Abhoth but I respectfully disagree. I think your group suffers from the perception that a 40 stat is super human, or that the game is capable of representing super/post humanity. Stats in the game do not scale linearly but fall on a bell curve. Linear scaleing runs contrary to physics for both biological and mechanical systems. I also think that most suffer from a "Terminator skewed" perception of what feats of physicality human sized machines might eventually be capable of accomplishing. Take biomorphs in the first case; If a flat has a COG max of 20 it might be reasonable to assume that that COG max indicates an IQ score of 200. However, it is probably not reasonable to assume a linear relationship in the two scores. IE; it's kinda silly to think that COG 40 people are going to score 400 an IQ test. (even if such a test could be devised.) Also, the function of COG in the game can't really be reduced to somthing so simple that it can be defined by IQ. SOM is similar in the fact that it represents more than strength and can't be scaled linearly. I'm *roughly* twice as strong as everyone I work with. I routinely lift and move 200kg. Judging from what i see of the average human at my gym I'm more than twice as strong as the average flat. But that doesn't put me in the 15-20 range for SOM because recent Olympic and strongman records indicate that there are probably tens of thousands of people who are 3 times stronger than me. Does that mean that people who have a 20 SOM can deadlift 500kg and people who have a 40 SOM can heft a long ton? Clearly not. Physics contraindicates any anthropomorphic system lifting a ton in 1g. In the case of the stat 40 fighter being bested by a stat 15 flat of equal skill; No mention is made of durability or SPD, but assuming it's equal, take away their moxy and put them in a cage, it will be fairly unlikely that the flat will win because reflexes gives a big advantage on the initiative roll to the transhuman. Should it be impossible for a character who spent at least 1/3 more Rez to win in that special situation? Nope. Because a flat with skill equal to a transhuman fighter is really rare. On the flip side; a transhuman fighter with no SPD bonus and DUR = to that of a flat is also Rare and very odd. My point is it's a flawed scenario because fighting, like most things in EP, involves much more than aptitude scores to indicate ability. So aptitude scores really don't mean that much on the scale of the whole system. Finaly; The Terminator. The terminator is fucking st00pid unrealistic. I'll start with the fact that the terminator, (in the cannon of the termintator saga) is made of unobtanium. Finish with the fact that I came home frusterated today because I spent most of the day sitting on 10000lbs of hydraulics and diesel engine that can't come close to doing what the termintator can do. I will begin my morning tomorrow by replacing hydraulic lines and welding the bucket back together. My point is; Pick any reason, (those reason's are NUMEROUS), that EP has failed to achieve a T888 or that synth morphs are not fabulously more rugged than SOTA biomorphs. But accept the fact as it is. Making a super robot that looks like a human and is also terminator tough is only slightly less impossible than it is desirable or necessary. To make sure you know, I'm not disparaging your perspective, just sharing my own even though I know it won't change how you see the game. In an odd way accepting the limitations of transumans makes the game seem less limited to me.