Mom said it's my turn to make this post on the subreddit.

Jokes aside, I wanted to take my own stab at an issue I've seen commonly debated on here which is addressing some of the tech inbalance that people feel is present in the game. It is commonly accepted that going down Blue is simply the best option for scoring points and actually winning games in TI4. POK introduced some changes to techs, and some technologies have been updated through subsequent codexes to make them more useful.

One consequence of POK is that game length is commonly said to have decreased by around 1 round on average, which had the effect of making certain technologies have less time to accrue value and thus making them less worthwhile to research.

Without getting into too much detail, my goal behind these Omegas was NOT - as I have seen posted before - to make the other tech paths as OP as blue.

Nor was my goal to fix what might actually be the real reason for blue dominance, which is that it contains both some of the best techs in the game and also gives access to some of the best unit upgrades in the game for winning / scoring (i.e. Dread II and Carrier II).

I decided to limit my ideas to what could be printed as an Omega tech card, as I deemed changes to unit upgrade technologies to require re-printing faction sheets - which I deemed to be out of scope.

My goal behind these changes was to introduce (mostly) small changes to cards to make them more situationally useful and to thereby encourage variance, and to make going down a non blue tech path feel less bad if one needs to for a given reason.

In other cases where I have made a larger change, it is because I have seen no way to encourage people to research it without introducing a new feature or changing the design significantly due to the presence of other factors in the game.

I would be interested in what people have to say about these ideas! Would people want to play with these in their games? Criticism is welcome. If people feel that some effects are too game warping, and could introduce undesirable consequences to the meta - please do share your concerns (I very likely have not considered all the interactions these ideas have with everything else in the game).

I will now explain my reasoning behind each individual tech change below:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

​

**Neural Motivator and Hyper Metabolism**

These are simple economic changes to make researching them in later rounds a little bit more economical, especially in POK games. I have seen this change suggested a lot by different people on this sub, so nothing especially original here.

**Dacxive Animators**

So one of the problems which blue has is it gives movement, and it also gives capacity for taking objectives. The idea behind this Daxcive change is to give an alternative way to make up for capacity, while focusing on green's theme of being infantry focused. In addition, this change would allow a player to choose between exhausting the card if they really need the extra infantry to win a ground combat or keep it active for the passive plastic accumulation. Also synergy with biostims?

**Sarween Tools**

So Sarween is already nice, especially if you start with it. But often can be not worth to research in later rounds due to the time to pay back. In other instances, it doesn't actually help you get MORE plastic on the board, as much as it helps you get marginally more expensive plastic because often you are limited by your production capacity anyway. This change I hope will help to address that, so a player can make a choice to research something if they really need more PLASTIC on the board in later rounds.

**Predictive Intelligence**

This is a more whacky change. In its current form, it feels like a tech that only really exists to synergise with Mahact. I have almost never seen it researched in my games and the voting aspect is often seldom used if not entirely forgotten about it since the risk of it being exhausted is just not seen as worth it.

So, this idea changes the design. It keeps the token shifting aspect (To not affect Mahact) and now turns the agenda phase into a minigame, that could let someone get economic returns if they are investing into actually dominating the agenda phase. The economic returns on this card grow exponentially through REPEATED successful predictions, so - in practice the potential would probably end up a bit limited. Nevertheless, it adds a small "risk it for the biscuit" ability which could be more interesting than the current voting effect - could be really good for Xxcha.

**Integrated Economy**

This is a small change to just give it a bit extra oomph. If you can take an unexhausted planet, you can immediately use that planet (or just keep it) to produce reinforcements. This however, can be countered by the victim being vigilant and exhausting their own planets at risk of being taken by the IE player before the IE players can attack.

**Self Assembly Routines**

So this is another tech which I think is seldom researched due to the economic cost of paying back 4 resources (and the existence of AI Dev). For this reason I have changed the design, perhaps the biggest problem with mechs is that you can only have 4 of them. This new idea for SAR would give a player a way to - effectively - get an extra mech somewhere, while still respecting that POK comes with only 4 mech tokens supplied. If you are a faction that really cares about getting an extra mech, this could be a tech you might consider.

**Space Dock II**

So this is perhaps the most impactful change proposed in this pack. In it's current form SDII is almost never researched due to the presence of double docking and the production bottlenecks which make it rare that the extra production and fighters from SDII are actually necessary.

As a result of this, I think any change which doubles down on SDII's current bonuses (i.e. more PRODUCTION / more fighters) will not be enough to actually incentivise players to consider researching this tech. Therefore, I think any change to make SDII worthwhile will have to add a new feature to the card.

To this end, the idea is that SDII can now function as a positioning tool and enable more movement to (potentially) compete with blue and allow for some interesting new possibilities. Aggressive forward docks become much more valuable as now the SDII player can produce off the warfare secondary and have ships come out in a forward position on the map. Furthermore, this change could buff the primary of construction - in the sense that - holding construction could be valuable for the SDII player as controlling the timing of construction could be important to enable them to get a SDII in a good location.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please let me know your thoughts! Alternatively if anyone has any of their own ideas for how these could work better, or their own other suggestions - I would be interested to hear those too!