Just found this mod a few days ago, and I love it. Great work!
Some feedback:
1) Having more powerful races on Ice-X impossible is fun, but sometimes the racial picks become a bit too homogenous, detracting from the feel of variety in the game. For example, in one of my games 5/6 opponents all had the subteranian trait. Several times most of my opponents will have maxed out skills in both space attack and space defense (meklar, alkari, mrrshan, etc). Thus you lose the cool dynamic where, say, the alkari had awesome defense, while others had awesome attack, and the special traits actually defined the way a race was, like how only certain races were subterinian when it made sense for their lore.
I would much prefer if instead of placing the added difficulty into the race design (where it inherently will destroy some distinctivness, there being only so many picks), that instead the difficulty level was simply uniformly tweaked on ice-x impossible, perhaps just cutting the build costs/research rates/economics of all the ai races by a flat amount.
Alternatively, if that couldn't be easily coded, perhaps proliferating "creative" among most/all of the ai races instead of some other picks would still preserve difference well while allowing the other traits to define the racial differences more. Also, it would mitigate the ai's poor performance in picking tech.
2) I would love to see game speed settings that slow tech advancement, perhaps an epic setting for 3x research points? Perhaps done through an alternate ice-x epic exe with the expanded tech requirements? Would be fun to get a chance to experience a little warfare at each research level, instead of blazing through.
3) I'm not sure how much you want to alter things, but I think a major problem in moo2's design was the effect of the production and research buildings in producing without pop units, most notably the research lab, supercomputer, and autolab. In practice this usually meant that, at least during all critical expansion, most of my colonies became production, while buikding the research buildings and leaving them unoccupied, meaning relativelly little research was done by actual scientists.
I'd love to see things changed so the buildings give a higher per pop bonus, but less of a base bonus. Thus, the far flung produuction empire of tiny colonies with autolabs built doesn't get to always outcompete an empire of more developed worlds attempting to research.
Anyway, not sure how much is within the scope of your plans, either way, thanks for creating the great mod!
