[Tiamat101]

I would be infavor switching bank-hack and ship steal in the research line. Anyone with demo right now can have ship steal by tick24 and they wont lose that much time in actual research, i've done it 2 rounds now, where i steal pods tick 24 and 27 and attack tick 30 for 50-100k score gains. I think this should be moved back so that you have to spend actual ticks getting to it. This way unless you want to bonus tick 36 for it people wont have ship steal till tick 50ish, and by that point they will be way far behind that its not just a "oh ill give up my startup bonuses" Then its another 24 ticks till they can start mining roids and even another 20 ticks til they can build ships of their own. At this point we are at tick 100 and they are TT0 and no Core and maybe 50k value in fleets.

I am not saying its impossible it is just a very commited play style form that point, much like scanning where you have to give up quite a bit of your round start to do it.