You are right to cater to the majority. I don't mind adjusting a few things to my liking.
I try to work both sides, and support whatever methods the people who play the mod prefer. Back when I first started, I'd intended all players to begin the mod in the Ancient Era and play through, but enough people wanted to start closer to the custom content that I've now spent more time balancing the game for an Industrial start than anything else.
It's just that in this particular case, the easiest and least problematic way to fix the issue happens to work against you. I'll see if there's any easy way to make it more flexible.
Playing your mod was the first time I built the spaceship and I enjoyed that it was just part of the game and not a win condition.
Exactly. The game should have had a series of these along the way, things that you don't absolutely have to do but which define their eras in various ways. It would have made things so much more interesting.
Imagine if, in the late Medieval/early Renaissance, you had to complete a series of artistic Projects to trigger the "Enlightenment", a pseudo-Golden Age that boosts scientific research, happiness, and growth (instead of the usual production and gold) for a long period of time.
Imagine a mid-Industrial "World War" event where everyone is FORCED into a war, even if they didn't want to fight, with their "side" automatically set for them based on their relationships. (Be careful not to be the one guy everyone hates...)
Imagine an Age of Colonization, where you are given a supply of free Colony Ships that, when used to settle new continents, create new city-states allied to you (instead of being cities you directly control), but that normal Settlers still see the oceans as impassable until after the end of that period (so that by the time you can get true settlers over there, all the good spots have been taken by colonies loyal to your enemies).
Imagine an Age of Revolution where any captured city-states or cities in unhappy empires have a high chance of splitting off into independent nations, but where these new nations' alliances can be bought cheaply by folks angling for a diplomatic win.
I could go on, but you get the idea. You could have a dynamic environment where each era is defined by a certain task or temporary ruleset that everyone's gameplay shifts around, similar to how the Nuclear Era focuses on the spaceship (but if you don't build a ship, you don't lose THAT much). I've really been tempted to create a new mod that does exactly this, with one key event or rule change per Era, but it'll probably have to wait for the DLL to be done right.
The space race-Breakout combo is really just the prototypical event for this sort of thing. It shouldn't be the ONLY event, though, and I think that's a failing in the core game's design.
I wish there was a way to keep things interesting during the repeatable tech period. It would be nice to have a choice between a few repeatable techs that increase a value each time they are researched like happiness, culture, military (free XP?) etc... but then there would have to be a way to necessitate those increases.
I've actually thought the same; instead of a single Transcendent Thought, you could have a Transcendent Thought, Transcendent Art, Transcendent Creation, etc. that boost happiness, culture, production, etc., probably with Transcendent Thought being the +Happiness one. It'd require a bit of re-coding and a LOT of rebalancing, but it'd add a nice way to keep the Transcendent Era interesting.
The problem is that lore-wise, it doesn't make much sense to take this too far. The whole point of transcendence is that you stop worrying about worldly issues (hence the population decrease; most ascended folks aren't going to work in factories or fight your wars, even if they're still around). At best, you had the epilogue of SMAC's best ending where you saw what ascended folks could do, but it wouldn't be right to add military bonuses or anything to these paths.
It would be nice to have a reason other than score to research future techs, but I guess most games are over by that point anyway.
And that's the crux of it. By the time you get to that era, the game's already won and you're just trying to see the last little bits of custom content. Adding more content at that point just seems like a bit of a waste; if it's fairly straightforward, like the multiple repeatable techs mentioned above, then I'm fine with that. But anything more intricate is just overkill.
And this goes back to something I said before: I'm trying to make the typical endpoint, the point where you KNOW the game is won, occur in the late Fusion, whereas right now it's more like late Digital/early Fusion. And that means I need suggestions on how to rebalance things in the eras that still matter, to make it harder to finish the game so early. Things like:
> Raise the "Home Field Advantage" promotion from its current 10/20%, so that it's harder to sweep through other nations. OR, just boost the defensive abilities of several other national wonders to accomplish the same goal.
For instance, I'd thought about adding a Magna Carta national Wonder way back when, that added a significant defensive bonus (all infantry units +50% when defending, all cities +33% strength, that sort of thing) and added +1 food to unemployed Citizens, sort of a fifth member of the Wall Street/Red Cross/etc. set of 4 that I'd added previously. (Except that, of course, it'd be at an earlier tech than those others.)
> Raise the amount that culture costs scale with number of cities, back to its pre-patch values. Right now, there's really little downside to getting a massive number of cities if you want to go for a culture win. Or, I could REALLY slow down the rate at which culture buys policies, but add a less controllable way of acquiring them (like a KGB-esque national wonder that lets you randomly "steal" policies that other civs have). This'd make it harder to beeline towards a culture win.
> Make it harder to lock up all the city-states, where the cost of influencing a city-state rises as you gain more of them. (Possibly by type, where your second Maritime costs more than your first, or conversely, where having one Maritime makes other maritimes easier but makes culturals or militaristics harder.) Alternately, I've been looking into having city-states offer more missions to people they have no relationships with; right now, most of the high-yield missions (build a Wonder, get a certain Great Person) are only offered to players that have already built up some influence. This'd make it far easier to steal alliances from other folks.
See, that sort of thing. I need to know how people are winning the game, what technology level they're at when they win, and how close they or the AIs were to winning with one of the other methods. Unfortunately, despite the fact that over 200 people download each version, I get maybe six people commenting between each release, so it's REALLY hard to get this balanced correctly.
). The AIs also had an annoying habit of waiting and building up their forces before launching their next offensive against me (as opposed to in the past where I'd developed a tactic/ exploit whereby I kept an AI down by not accepting a peace treaty with them, and the AI would continueally dribble one and two units at me). 
