Faction (from original 7) that you DISLIKE the most

[Yitzi]

Yea, making the 5 turns of no research per -RESEARCH into a moddable variable would work.  If Believers didn't have this penalty then they'd be more competitive.

Is it 5 per point, or 10 flat?

Far as growth, exponential probably wasn't the right word.  Growth does need to be quadratic or so.  Changing that would disrupt the whole game as there should always be that economic vs military tradeoff in all stages.  If growth is more linear then the game stagnates and becomes a lot more focused on war than building up.  Similarly if growth rate is too high then war is never worth the risk.  I'd actually say there isn't much issue here.  It's more that quadratic growth means a quadratic increase in former count, because terraforming your land is the main growth bottleneck (the other being infrastructure/drone control).  I think that there should have been more than just one former upgrade (Super) throughout the game, and perhaps a better way to queue up former commands.  But those would be big changes.

Actually, quadratic growth means linear growth in former count, since linear growth in former count translates to quadratic growth in terraforming.

[Nexii]

It's 5 per point which is actually better

Yea, I do get what you're saying.  Roughly speaking I think population growth is between linear and quadratic (but can be expressed as quadratic equation).  There's then other rates like FOP/sq, facility increases, then a few other tech-related boosts like weapon/armor/reactor, SEs, and SPs.  Multiplying those benefits from tech & infra with population growthrate, I think you get a total faction power rate that increases faster than quadratic and a bit slower than cubic.  But this is all quite theoretical.  How many formers are typical for a player at each stage?  1-5 early, maybe 20 or so mid, 100+ late.  Same issue arises with military units.  I think it's more a mid to late game costing issue.  Later on there should be more costly formers and military units that are accordingly more powerful so you don't need huge swarms.  Same with native life and probes, I suppose.  Reactors probably should have been quadratic (10 HP / 40 HP / 90 HP / 160 HP) with cost increases linear (1x/2x/3x/4x)

[Yitzi]

It's 5 per point which is actually better

Yea, I do get what you're saying.  Roughly speaking I think population growth is between linear and quadratic (but can be expressed as quadratic equation).  There's then other rates like FOP/sq, facility increases, then a few other tech-related boosts like weapon/armor/reactor, SEs, and SPs.  Multiplying those benefits from tech & infra with population growthrate, I think you get a total faction power rate that increases faster than quadratic and a bit slower than cubic.  But this is all quite theoretical.  How many formers are typical for a player at each stage?  1-5 early, maybe 20 or so mid, 100+ late.  Same issue arises with military units.  I think it's more a mid to late game costing issue.  Later on there should be more costly formers and military units that are accordingly more powerful so you don't need huge swarms.  Same with native life and probes, I suppose.  Reactors probably should have been quadratic (10 HP / 40 HP / 90 HP / 160 HP) with cost increases linear (1x/2x/3x/4x)

More costly+powerful military units can currently be done, by playing with weapon and armor powers and cost formulae.  Formers are trickier, but I think having a variable support cost will allow them to have an effective cost increase as time goes on in exchange for more power...

[binTravkin]

Some food for thought:

First improvements, first buildings, boreholes, crawlers, wonders, lifted resource limits - all of it felt like such an important step in your growth. When i play modern games like Civ 5 or especially something like EU4, i really miss that feeling. You do a lot of different things, and they account for like 5% growth. Why even bother? In SMAC you were doubling your entire economy in 20 turns i think? Or maybe even faster.

From a thread about CivBE on apolyton: http://apolyton.net/showthread.php/205731-So-anyone-else-happy-SMAC2-is-finally-being-made?p=6317626&viewfull=1#post6317626