I played a lot with Yor and custom synthetic races, so this is a thread to discuss them.

1) Race creation:

-You do not need population growth, which gives you 2 free design points. (Infertile)

-the base population cap, as well as techs that increase population are rather high, so you can take reduced population cap (Poor Farmers) for another 2 points (also the population cap is bugged at the moment)

-You should always take at least 1 speed so pirates can not catch you (they only have a base speed 2)

-I really like Handy +2 which will save you quite a bit of money

As for abilities we have to take synthetic. I would highly recommend prolific instead of the default Yor adaptable ability. You get access to tier 1 extreme worlds rather fast anyways, but the additional population from prolific will slingshot your economy to #1 early on.

2) Early strategies:

-the capital should only have factories with 100% focus on manufacturing

-manufacturing should be split up so you get 1.5 assembly projects for every colony ship

-buy out your first few factories

-buy out you a few scouts and the first few colony ships

-the first colony should focus on research (so you start getting research in the first place)

-early techs to get:

  *collective manufacturing

  *industrial mechanization

  *power matrix

  *xeno commerce

  *interstellar governance

-ideology wise i made very good experiences with malevolent, especially the ruthless path. every thing in ruthless is just incredible synergistic with synthetic races.

you do not really need early weapons or ships because planetary invasions can only happen from age of war onwards (unless the enemy goes for early aggression 3 in the malevolent ideology tree)

With this setup you can usually pump out a colony ship in 2 turns + the population you lost on the homeworld. This gives you an incredible advantage over the meatbag races, because they can only dream getting 3 population every 2 turns. The prolific ability will then double this population giving you a huge population and planet advantage.

3) Mid games strategies:

I can't really comment on this because in my games the ai has fallen so far behind at that point that i can basically do whatever i want

4) Feedback on playing synthetic races:

Balance wise synthetic races have incredible advantages because of free trait points (which is somehow balanced that they have to take synthetic ability) and that they do not need farms, i.e. you have more tiles for other buildings. When it comes to colonization and invasions, synthetic races are quite micro-intensive because you have manually assign assembly projects for every ship that drains population. The early expansion described earlier feels outright broken compared to non-synthetic races. I also do not like that you are pretty much confined to the Yor technology tree where many techs and buildings refer directly to the Yor, i.e. playing a custom synthetic race that has nothing to do with the Yor feels very awkward.

5) Suggestions:

-heavily reduce the initial population cap (i suggest to set it to 4 with giving the capital a bonus of 4 for a total of 8)

-techs that increase the global population bonus should have an reduced effect, but unlock buildings that locally increase the population cap

-assembly projects should give a population growth boost instead of flat population, e.g. assembly +0.2 population growth for 10 turns (and every further assembly project increasing the effect by 10 turns as long as it is active), so you cannot spam full colony ships in the early game every 2-3 turns indefinitely.

-buildings and techs of synthetic races should not be named after the Yor but after the civilizations short name (which would be Yor for the Yor but otherwise for custom civilizations)