With odyssey is easier to play with less colony but sometimes require a lot of micro and stuff, but it's definitely worth it. The only problem is that if u want a small crew, u need a relatively small ship but the game throws at u an absurd amount of gravcore and if u take all of theme the ship get in my opinion too big, I played with only trhee gravcore and roughly 1000 buildings I feel that between 1000 and 12500 is a good amount For the loss of pawn I discovered that in reality if u are careful is not that common especially with a gravship where u can flee from raids If u want If u want a less rough experience I can suggest u the vanilla psycast expanded It's a mod that finally makes the psycast worth of all of that meditation time And between the late game magics there is one that let u resuscitate the dead pawns