Hey Ryika, I was sick this week and just wanted to say your mod was the perfect remedy and I couldn't put it down sometimes even feeling as bad as I was. Just won a turn 361 Commonwealth Victory, followed by Contact a few turns later. Was about to stick it out ten turns for Emancipation, but my close neighbor backstabbed me and I didn't want to deal with that.
The real strength of your mod is how complicated and interconnected the various new systems are. Your supremacy is ridiculously fun to play-I founded 12 of my own cities, and conquered two capitals. By endgame, my OBSRVRs were banking 25p 45s 30e from buildings and moonbase and Africa specialist bonus. If you've ever played mass effect, this is literally a Geth civ, interconnected robots that learn from and boost each other. When I built that first puny 5e 5s guy, I was hesitant to even work him since my normal human specialists totally outclassed him-next thing I know, they're literally putting the human specialists out of a job, are running my entire empire yield wise and are even calling the shots with that Supremacy victory flavor text. The humans in my society slowly lost the reins to automation by conscious AI, and in the end I gladly gave those robots rights, which is something the base game didn't even bother to address. And when I started work on the Emancipation Gate, the purity sponsors showed their disgust at my society's transformation over the communique, which may have always been a thing but certainly had more weight with all your gameplay and flavor additions.
That said, I did run into some issues. Exiting and loading the game reset my Golden Age points, and since I left a session in the middle of a Golden Age, upon loading it never ended, giving me a permanent 200% growth boost (gee, I wonder why my capital ended up with 50 pop) which was at least amusing. This also locked me out of diplomatic positions for the rest of the game (whatever) and reset my status with the Commonwealth, but oddly enough did not reset my traits. By the way? Those traits are awesome-a good chunk of my resources came from station trade, and I actually prioritized diplomatic capital for once-that stuff was more valuable than science most the time.
I also ran into issues with the late Supremacy quests, particularly the Harmony one about stealing science and then killing aliens. This quest looped on me-each time I completed the steps, it made me start again with the steal science and never completed. There was also a base Rising Tide quest that required me to build a CEL Cradle, and then build 2 manufactures, which I obviously couldn't do. All the Commonwealth quests worked fine, although I stopped running into them around the midgame.
Pacing was great, early game was challenging, and unlocking the various new systems (including the Commonwealth) was very rewarding. Midgame gives you a lot to do, and is the first time when I was encouraged NOT to rush the next tier of techs, as most would take 30+ turns and by shopping around the leaf techs I could cut that down by a lot. There were several times I teched too far ahead and ran out of things to build, which meant I had to spend more time lower in the tree. Really well balanced.
At the end of the midgame, some of the really good wonders started to pop up. Man, I don't think I've been as satisfied with a wonder as I have with the Quantum Computer. I unlocked something like 20 techs with that thing, and it felt like from that moment on I had won the game it was that powerful. Ironically, I think Civ VI tried something similar with their Great Library unlocking all classical techs, only by time you it, you were well into medieval, so it mostly fell flat. Not so here. Same thing with city specialization, you do a lot of the district stuff with the balance between Metro/Power/Industry. Of my 14 cities, I had three of each specialization, and left the others unspecialized. The power grids were on my coasts for trade access, and once neoplanatariums went up and Comm Sats came online, I had orbital coverage over nearly the whole map, which was insane in a good way. Brazilia on the other continent got antsy at one point and declared war for the sole purpose of shutting down my Comm Sats, which I'm sure he found hilarious until he realized I just redirected all that petroleum for covering all my cities with Deep Space Satellites instead.
That brings me to the endgame. This played out a lot like the midgame-even though I had enough diplo capital and production by turn 275 or so to start on the four Commonwealth victory token buildings, I was barely managing 800 science per turn. Given that even with the discount from traits, the Teleporter tech was sitting at something like 400,000 science, I had to redirect my efforts towards unlocking every minor leaf tech I could find. And wow, whichever tech it was that gave +6 diplomatic capital per city is easily one of the best ones on there, that did wonders. In the end, it was heavy optimization of Supremacy and Harmony buildings, plus serious manipulation of Commonwealth resource market that allowed me to pull out 2000 science from each of my 14 cities, and at that point it was just a waiting game. Although, even in that there were a lot of decisions to be made even as I mostly hit next turn. This is where I filled out the moonbase and waited around for my 1500 building materials to show up. (And of course I got the +400 materials event ten turns after I built the darn Mountain Observatory!) This was on one of the lower difficutlies, but in the post game stats the AI was no where close in science or production. The endgame requires such optimization and almost exponential growth, that I wonder if the AI is capable of getting those endgame techs even with the ridiculous deity bonuses. But I'm sure it's happened-and they certainly know how to beat the player militarily.
On that note, I have to point out another exploit I noticed. Around the time I unlocked tier III virtues, I picked the bonus quantity from strategics policy in military. Now not only did it give me extra resources, but it also gave me +2 trade capacity, which is fine. However, it calculated building materials and progenator alloys based on the TOTAL amount I had throughout the game, rather than what I had on hand. As a result, I netted something like 800 of both out of thin air. Given the way you coded them, I don't see a way around this, but that is one heck of a powerful virtue as is. And over in science we have winners like +2 health >_> Hard to go wrong with Industry and Society, though.
Okay, that about wraps up my comments. I'll let you know if I think of anything else. As said, this was an amazing overhaul and you've really fleshed out all the systems. There are still a few kinks, and I still kind of miss the old colossal aliens and diplomacy modifiers from regular Rising Tide, but for the most part it is really solid. Thanks for all your hard work, on this, and on your previous mods.
One last thing-I had no issues with the faction "shortcomings" and didn't even notice not having mines or generators. I planned around it with my colony picks, focusing on aristocrats for energy and taking the super flexible +2 trade capacity. For other civs, I would probably tailor my colony choices to fit their weaknesses the same way-that's a GOOD thing, makes the choices more dynamic. By the end of the game, I was mostly using Supremacy improvements, and in fact I had this really neat triangle node wall set up around a bunch of sexy nanoscapes enveloped by mountains. It was like a parade ground out of freaking TRON, it was awesome.