Okay here are the notes from my playtesting. They are in approximate chronological order.
[*]I played as Morgan on Librarian difficulty. I don't know what his stats are as his datalinks have not been updated.
I've checked the files I uploaded, and you're right: they aren't. I'll need to include the new datalinks on the next update.
[*]Everything is really expensive! Because of this, cities have to grow pretty huge before they are useful for anything, making GROWTH even more important than what it is normally. Pop caps hurt a bit though, but I was able to start spamming out pods when I had two size 8 cities. The Planetary Transit System could be very useful now, although would need to be prioritised for it to be any use as I managed to expand to cover my island before it was built.
I admit, I did make things expensive. Regular base facilities should generally be okay, though. The idea was to have players build a few of them first.
I'm actually glad to see Growth as valuable here. Planned hadn't seen the light of day as much as Free Market or Green...
-2 to Pop caps is one of Morgan's disadvantages...
The Planetary Transit System I deliberately chose to make more expensive, more so than most other projects.
[*]Was surprised when Secrets of the Human Brain didn't give a free tech.
Note that when one gets to Secrets of Creation, the achievement pillar thingy still claims it's Secrets of the Human Brain.
In earlier iterations, I had Secrets of the Human Brain as a free tech for the Believers. I also had Probability Mechanics act like a Secrets tech for a while. Nowadays, neither are true, but I still thought the Secrets thing should be for something higher up than a level 2 tech with only one prerequisite. And it wasn't worth rewiring the whole tech tree for that alone. Also, the text that mentioned Secrets of the Human Brain is on another, much larger text file.
[*]Switched to Democracy and Free Market as soon as they were available. I consider the +2 Economy boost more than worth the police trouble. 40% econ, 10% psych and 50% labs seemed to work well. When I got the Human Genome Project I was able to keep every base under permanent Golden Age. I stuck with Survival as my value as Wealth didn't provide anything useful for me. I stayed with None as my future society as None was more valuable than Cybernetic, even with the Network Backbone.
Suppose I expanded the Morale penalty in Free Market and maybe the Planet penalty in Democratic...?
Maybe I should take one research point away from Survival and None each.
[*]Losing a city to mind worms is more common (as defenders as so expensive and they take years to build cities are open targets until they grow). I resorted to loading autosaves as it's so painful to lose a city. Same for Formers and/or Colony Pods. Trance isn't enough to save them. Good thing I have so much money so spending 500 to 1000 to rush a defender isn't so expensive.
I should probably increase the combat bonus of Trance to 60 or 70%...
[*]It is possible to reverse engineer the starting units to get Speeders and Lasers.
I may revert combat units to having hand weapons.
[*]I found a Sea Former in pod, which let me get into the water quickly. It happily survived one Isle of the Deep attack as well.
Some of the sea improvements require Advanced Subatomic Theory, which doesn't require Doctrine: Flexibility. My plan was for there to be a no-tech way to get Sea Formers. I did it by replacing regular Unity Foils. Unfortunately, those formers don't seem to actually work in terraforming anything. Not sure why.
[*]First fungal pop at year 2202.
I... guess that's kinda early... Then again, I'm guessing your social choices had your Planet rating at -1.
[*]Missed the Virtual World.
I tried to get to it but I didn't know the tech that it needed, and when I did it wouldn't let me beeline to it.
Better luck next time? ^^;
[*]Mind Worms seem incredibly tough for some reason -- a defender in a base easily falls to a mind worm boil, even with a [red] fission reactor.
I noticed this early on. While humanity is in mild/moderate development levels, native life is strengthening quickly enough. Also, I've noticed that psi combat ignores reactors. A unit with an electric battery will have the same chances against a mind worm boil as its singularity engine counterpart.
[*]After I got over the early hump, things got a lot easier. Advances every few turns, running out of city names (I named my latest base "Morgan Morgan"
). But yeah, research was a big priority as the tech for economic victory is quite late on the tech tree. With the ecomony boost, I was of course the leader of both money and technology.
Having technology acquisition jump that much wasn't really a priority of mine. Then again, hopefully the research rate at the end of the game wasn't as high as, say, a breakthrough every turn or two...
[*]I like how Engineers give Psych. What do they do, build jukeboxes?
I never tried to explain in-game why every single specialist gives a psych bonus. I just knew that if I did that, they might be a bit more worthwhile to grab while they're available. (Transcendi now strictly outclass all other specialists including Engineers.)
[*]I was one turn away from having enough money at M.Y. 2369, and then an global energy market crash! Yay. Managed to start it at M.Y. 2383 instead. Fusion Labs came far too late to have any real effect. I never was able/aware of being able to start that Global Trade Pact, somebody else did after I had the victory already underway. One base was producing 651 energy per turn.
Maybe I should move Fusion Labs down to Applied Relativity or something, and a few of AR's applications to Unified Field Theory. Not sure how the game will fare with Planet Busters that late, though.
[*]Biology Labs may be a bit late in the tech tree to be useful, not sure. I was trying to beeline to Sentient Econometrics.
I had them switch places with Centauri Preserves, which became more urgent. I may decrease the cost of Biology Labs. Also, I really should change the prerequisite for Economic Victory back to Planetary Economics. I thought I already had.
[*]Towards the end about half of my cities were all Talents and Specialists. Every city was in Golden Age.
Impressive.
[*]Unifed humanity in M.Y. 2407! Score of 2856, 178% rating. My book is "Sentient Econometrics made simple" -- how ironic that I won via Economic.
That's my best ever score actually as well.
Technically, that's not how irony works, but whatever. Congratulations!
Hope that helps you out! These are my live comments, so if something that I remarked on is something you like, then don't worry about it, I was just trying to present anything that might be of use.
This helped out greatly! Thanks!
