No clue if work is still going into updating this game, but...

I've been playing this game since very shortly after release.  The snowballing has always kind of bothered me, so I thought I'd throw in some thoughts on how to help balance the game a bit better.

Scaling AI bonuses by era: AI on Normal starts with no bonuses over the player and each era progression they get 10% to all the things that increasing the difficulty would add to. Hard starts at 10%, whatever is lower than Normal starts at -10% and balance that way for the rest. 

Reduce FIDSI % bonuses: Most of them could be halved. I feel it would flesh out the pacing of the game. Even 20% isn't particularly effective early game, so it wouldn't really extend it much to make the bonuses 10% and would help limit mid-game snowballing.  Perhaps make it based on game speed. The slower the speed, the lower the bonuses.



Other ideas.

Increase strategic resource extractor production by .5 every era. That way by the time you're wanting to produce the best weapons, you can actually develop the resources to make it happen. This will also give you more of the earlier resources, meaning you can choose between quality and quantity, which is always a nice trade-off. This will also make it so there's less feeling like you're wasting your tier 1 resources on upgrades when you're just going to upgrade further/let those units die later.


Armor/Weapon techs into one tech. Most people I know who play this seem to agree that this should be one tech. Taking 2 techs discourages getting both or either for earlier tiers, since there's much more valuable tech. When only one is chosen, it's usually armor for the accessories, which Glasssteel damage bonus accessories tend to add more damage than the weapons to begin with.


Make the FIDS Inefficient custom traits subtract half the points their positive trait counter-parts do. I can do this much myself, but it doesn't work in multiplayer and when not making crazy min/max builds wouldn't be broken. Online play doesn't seem to be competitive, anyway.




Additionally, if anyone could give me comprehensive, step-by-step instructions on how to do this myself, assuming it's possible, I'd gladly put in the work and release the mod on Steam. 

That's a fair point about the weapons/armor, but that decision is implemented in the different materials giving different bonuses and early resource limitations. The way it stands, the tech variable is less of a choice than the others. You kind of get shoe-horned in rather than actually  having choices. I feel the tech being a 3rd variable in the matter is redundant and counter-intuitive. Also, I'll reiterate that the armor tech generally allows for more damage via accessories than weapons, so there's still no real point to take weapons when you're trying to maximize gain.