Race Mod Reviews - Tehom's Epic Mod

The Epic Mod makes changes to many aspects of the game, but I'll be looking just at the race changes. If you like the changes this mod makes to races, it's only two text files you'll need to take out to add them to your own MoO3.

Major Additions:

• Like BoP, Tehom also adds Economics, at 20 points per pick. He gives it entirely different values. At the top end for 40 points above normal, this reduces HFoG by 25% and fiddles with interest rates earned on savings and paid on debt. BoP gives similar benefits for only 20 points in his Social Order pick...they can't both be right in their evalutations.
  
• Tehom adds Pop Growth as a pick, costing 30 points per level: +30%/+15%/0/-15%. He also removes all hard-wired pop growth penalties and bonuses. On the plus side, this gives you a lot more flexibility. On the downside, the races become less distinct.
  
• What distinguishes Tehom's race mod are the THREE screens full of specials he adds. They cover bigger terraform rings, lower gravity penalties, fewer minerals requirements for industry, more money from industry, more test tubes per pop, more production per pop, inherent infrastructure bonuses, better spying, more taxes collected, more pop growth on top of the Pop Growth pick, and even Repulsive (a hat tip to MoO2).... It's like he opened the book and threw half the cool-looking race variables onto the screen. Are they balanced? Have no idea. But imbalances on the Race Pick screen are much less serious than hard-wired race bonuses, and there are so many of these you want to run out and play with them.
  

A race will need about 50 more points to keep its relative power in Tehom's mod:

What's not in the chart: for hard-wiring this is a pretty straight-forward mod--it's mostly all there. There are no hab changes.

Evaluation of Race Balance: Most of the races have, relatively, more points to spend than in Vanilla MoO. This is okay--you'll need them to play with all those specials. Tehom has put less thought into his hard-wired changes than into his race pick additions, and you can tell by the way similar races fail to balance against each other. There's no reason to ever play Tachidi when you can get the identical race with +60 points by playing the Klackon. Ditto with the Cynoid over the Meklar, & the Sakkra over the Grendarl. Cross-species comparisons are just as bad. Now that the Bugs have lost their population growth bonus, why play them when you can play a Robot, get the same number of points, and have a nice production boost? The Silicoids look to be the big winners in the hard-wired category. Double the mining, production as good as a Robot, no growth penalty? They'll outproduce the world. The Fish, who were fine, get a couple nice plusses, while the Lizards, who were weak, only get hurt. For balance, this one only gets a thumb and a half: 1/2

Evaluation of Race Differentiation and Creativity: Very cool specials, have I said that already? The Humanoids and the Gasbags are nicely diversified, but the Bugs, Lizards, Robots, and Fish are essentially just 4 races with 9 different graphics packages. Still I love the flexibility on the race-pick screen so much that I'm giving this one four thumbs out of five:

Would I play this one? You bet. I want to see what I can do with his specials.