OK, this might be a bit of a rant but this Sophon quest is seriously annoying. It comes the hell out of nowhere and asks you to pick between building nothing but Science-related improvements for 10 turns straight in order to get a +50 Science building or just garrisson two military units and get an improvement that boosts Happiness. But if you pick the former (which is pretty likely you will if you're playing Sophon), then you're probably in for some frustration for no good reason. 

First off, the game seems to be quite picky on what constitutes a Science improvement. The Cerebral Reality that gives you +10 Science and Dust? Not a Science improvement, apparently. 

Second, it locks into 10 turns of spinning your wheels , micro-managing things to a tedious level just to make sure that you don't finish anything. Oh, you can BUILD whatever you want in the meantime, you just can't FINISH it during those 10 turns. Apparently the "kids" don't mind that all your planets are building spaceships left and right (which is bound to happen because there's a limited number of "Science improvements" anyway), just so long as the aren't actually finished.

Third, it's frustrating to need to build something as soon as possible and be unable because of a quest. 10 turns is quite a long time where a lot of things can happen, from the main quest asking you to garrison units you don't have to protect your people from ENFER to the Cravers coming knocking at your door or the Vodyani starting to eat your people.

And the worst part is that if you mess up just once, that's it, quest failed, your shot at getting that new improvement is gone for good. It doesn't reset back to zero and lets you start over because something that affected the very survival of your empire demanded it, it's just gone. And if the intent of that quest was making us hate "those darn kids" as a bunch of entitled, self-absorbed $&#€@ who throw a hissy fit after witnessing the construction of something meant to protect them just because it's not what they wanted for Christmas, then mission accomplished.

.... so yeah, that quest gets a tiny bit under my skin, sorry .

I never found it difficult, but to be honest I'm playing it the military way to get the happiness improvement.

lo_fabre wrote:

I never found it difficult, but to be honest I'm playing it the military way to get the happiness improvement.

That way is easy. As he said, doing it the science way is immensely difficult to adapt to.

The science side is annoying because of how it actually works.  You don't need to destroy old science buildings, or even produce any science buildings at all.

You just need to make sure that the only things you finish building for the next 10 turns are science.

So this often means that for 10 turns i'm going to be shuffling my build queue's on the economy screen so I can "build" whatever I normally would, but when it has one turn left i move it to the bottom of the queue.  End of the 10 turns I get a science building and suddenly produce a ton of ships and upgrades that have been sitting on 1 turn to completion for up to 9 or so turns.

It's just tedious.  Now granted right now I purposely don't build science buildings in the early game because I know the quest will eventually come up(still in the early game), and then i'll just queue them all up and ignore it until it pops (and I do the science side purely for the minor if annoying challenge it gives), but that's hardly ideal either since it relies on foreknowledge of quests (and may not be realistic once we get more quests in the game).

in a way it might just be better if it's "Build X science buildings in Y turns".  I realize this might encourage the demolish and rebuild exploit, or lead to people being unable to do that line of the quest, but I sorta like the idea that you won't always be able to do every option on every quest.