Woot, reports from my first attempts at beta testing in a while.
Tried Hypercorp,got a ctd+ minidump and all that. Meh.
Their tech tree seems to be jumbled up, with there being a level four tech on the first page and all that. But thats most likely because of you trying to change that particular tree from defences into psionics. It might just be me speaking at the moment, but it does seem like they are still a little too similer to TEC.
Well except for their extractors, but thats another thing. Is there no way to have the asteroids upgrade into the refineries, or just plain blow up so they can be replaced. Might be just because that's how I'm used to playing, but my economy started to fizzle around the time I usually started upgrading with extractors, only to find out I couldn't (it was a small game)
Love the Rogue superweapon, can't wait to have a blast.
Planet Bombing for the Hypercorp tech? As in their increased focus in trade has increased their capabilities in debt collecting or something like that. Maybe trade the research speed over to hypercorp (as they throw money at the problem.) And give the infomorphs something like Armor or Animatter reserves (if they are still gonna be the small ability based race.)
I doubt they would actually share the benefits of a seed AI with other people, especially not after so many of them were sacrificed to form it.
For the Pirate lords pact, my first thought was something like greater pirate strength against others or similar, or weaker pirate numbers. But then in a game without pirates it would be rather useless. More phase jump speed/being able to phase jump out further out would have been my second suggestion. Until I realised that would infringe on the Vasari.