Modding towards a middle ground between SMAC and SMAX

[EmpathCrawler]

So far I've added back Fungal Payload on Advanced Spaceflight (love fungus, hate making random mountains), left Algorithmic Enhancement on Nanominiaturization, put Spore Launchers under Centauri Meditation, and left Sealurks on Centauri Psi. I've also done the traditional disabling of the Copter chassis and the Bunker. I'm considering disabling Mag Tubes, too. Thinker AI uses them more sparingly but it still made it very easy for me to absolutely crush a faction with relatively daring Mind Worm attacks in my latest game.

Haven't considered what SMAX facilities to re-add, but I miiiight be more generous. Probably won't be adding any of the projects.

[bvanevery]

I'm considering disabling Mag Tubes, too.

Don't.  It's incredibly tedious to get around a Huge map if you don't have them.  Instead, double the amount of time it takes to build them.  That slows down the human player's impulse to go "mag tube nuts".

[Nexii]

Other than Algorithmic Enhancement, not a fan of most of the SMAX abilities, units, facilities, and SPs. The expansion was too rushed to really fit in lore and strategy wise. A true expansion would have expanded the core game features like number of players, diplomacy, social engineering, victory conditions, instead of the peripherals. I always felt like alien life could have had more to it, Planet was not much opposition as you teched up. The idea of a second map might have been cool too, a sister planet maybe with some lore. I liked how Master of Magic had the dual map thing going on, haven't seen that in many 4X games since. Maybe the monolith sites or similar could have been expanded on as the gates between the two worlds.

It's kind of funny I didn't feel this way until I went from playing SMAX to SMAC. Lately I've just been modding off vanilla SMAC. HSA can be put a bit later in the game IMO.