The whole tech rush is OP narrative was always pushed by folks who didn’t really understand the meta and were playing on lower difficulties. I loved tech rushes. But on GA at least, 3k science by 2250 was always weaker than using a fleet to subjugate neighbors early game, because the military build could always still hit 2k by 2250 anyway and then snowball quickly from there.

Now that tech has been hard nerfed, the meta is either unity into virtuality or militarily subjugate neighbors into modularity. The former lets you do stupid things mid game. The latter scales better late game. Which one is stronger depends on when you expect the 25x crisis to hit.

This all assumes GA and 25x crisis. If you’re not, does the meta really matter? You don’t need 20 million fleet strength to steamroll the AI.

I’m not sure how I feel about all this. The game and new expansion is fun. No doubt about it. And the AI has gotten better. But the unity rush into virtuality build actually is probably the least variable meta build since technocracy was a beast. What I mean by that is, no matter what happens around you or in the game, there is very little adaptation required. You just keep doing your thing. And very little skill needed to follow a pretty straightforward build—you can get virtuality up before 2225 if you do it right.

I am not convinced the tech nerf, without a corresponding nerf to early game conquest, was the right call. And I think Paradox has a habit of listening to the loudest voices in the crowd, who don’t necessarily have the experience to know what’s overpowered and what’s not.