[Appocomaster]

afaik, no one who put forward the ideas ever played utopia. I spent a couple of weeks going over espionage and redesigning a lot of it and I've never played it. The formulae are no doubt very different :-)
the personalities idea has been kicking around for a while, I know.


The change in scans does mean that amps are no longer so important, so although it still takes time to research the tech trees it means that planets don't have to build up amps.*

The other way of doing this is to split the whole tech tree and put scans down in the second tree, with research for both sections being separate and other techs in this section being say core mining, roids over 2000 and maybe some of the advanced construction limits

*Edit: for clarification, basically this means if anything smaller alliances benefit in terms of not being able to scan distorter whores that many bigger alliances can.