Quick notes (played this a couple times so far).
Unity observations:
1) The early game unity cost for leaders is terrible. There's no way to get scientists out the door to explore early on. Each one takes what, a year or two or more of unity? And then they die off in strange exploration accidents?
1a) Changing the arrested development is a good move. It could even be increased to three or more levels, I think.
1b) As a fixed cost throughout the game, it seems like the point of this setup is specifically to hurt players early in the game. This doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
2) I think, somehow, we're paying double for expansion penalties with unity. Right now, wrapping all the unity stuff up seems to be harder than wrapping up the entire tech tree. I'm wondering if the point is that players shouldn't count on finishing their ascension perks to finish the game. Compared with other resources this seems too much, especially if there's not a lot of good ways to control sprawl.
2a) It feels like we have to pay an increased maintenance cost (like we might with a larger fleet size) at the same time that sprawl increases the base cost (which would be like linking megastructure cost to sprawl). This seems off, but maybe there's a way to beat it.
2a) In this setup, the edict budget is way too small to do anything useful. If you look at the Executive Vigor perk, it's pretty useless since it doesn't scale with sprawl. If you wanted to keep that as powerful as it is before the patch, it should pay something closer to 1000 per month.
3) Monthly edict payments are interesting and probably a net good. But maybe overpriced? I'm comparing the cost of paying the current monthly rate for 10+ years versus what they cost in the standard version. At a gameplay level, does it mean that ultimately we won't be trying to increase governor and scientist levels very aggressively?
4) Ranking up planets is pretty pointless right now. It's way, way too expensive for the cost in many instances. I'm not going to burn piles of unity so I can reduce the upkeep cost of a researcher by some incremental amount.
4a) If the plan is to stick with Unity, then it may make sense to introduce a culture/unity world type -- sort of an equivalent to having a tech world.
5) As a hive etc. player, what the heck am I supposed to do with all that political influence? Reading the dev comments, it seems almost as if the idea is to effectively combine unity and political influence. From a broader perspective, this makes some sense. But the question about whether it takes influence or unity to do this particular task while the other resource is consumed for different tasks seems like making a distinction with no meaningful difference. At this point, maybe the fix is to just bite the bullet and combine them.
6) The new sprawl mechanic is OK. I noticed as a hive I could get autocurating vaults but they didn't seem to affect sprawl. Is this just a sort of oversight particular to hives? Would I normally be able to build those on bigger planets to help mitigate sprawl? I like the idea of sprawl being something that can at least be partially addressed, even if we can't keep it at zero as in earlier versions.
Overall, the unity thing has the feel of constraining play, rather than adding depth or a new dimension. If I really optimize and pay a lot of attention to it, I can do almost as well as I could earlier without watching it at all closely. There doesn't seem to be any particular upside. That might show up with a rework of planet upgrades and edicts costs, but right now, it's mainly a headache requiring more micromanagement. If it went out the door as is, I'd probably rate it as a net negative. But that's why we have beta testing. If the costs get worked, getting new leaders isn't so expensive to early game players, edict budgets, and planet upgrades, you've probably got a pretty solid addition here.
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Other non-Unity observations.
1) It looks like the effort to let the AI specalize a bit has some kinks that need to be worked out. The biggest thing I saw was the number of specialized purification/energy grid/food processing buildings, quite often upgraded and consuming strategic resources, even though the planet itself either never had any of those districts or had replaced them with other stuff. In play terms, it turns out to be a way to mitigate the very high monthly resource costs of edicts, but that's sort of an incidental benefit, not an actual fix.
There's some other stuff, but I don't think it's specific to this beta, so I'll look around those discussion threads that someone may have mentioned.
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