Race Mod Reviews - Planet Buster's Race Mod

Major Additions:

• Adds Bard of Prey's Economics Pick, though PB has prettied it up by removing the broken feature that was supposed to add AUs to your starting treasury, and adding instead some minor reductions to interest paid on debt.
  
• Adds Bard of Prey's Social Order Pick, though again not "fixing" what Bard of Prey himself thought was an underpriced Utopian pick.
  
• A new pick, Aptitude, at 10 points per step. Superior Aptitude gives +2 to Military, Recreation, and Government DEAs, and -20% Oppressometer costs. Poor Aptitude gives +10% to Oppressometer costs, and -1 to Mil, Rec, and Gov efficiency. This idea reminds me of Sabin's Military Pick, and again I like this idea. I thought Sabin's idea was over-priced; this one seems under-priced. But maybe not: most players don't seem to appreciate these three DEAs. If 100 people were asked whether they'd pay 20 points for Planet Buster's Superior Aptitude, I wonder how many would say yes?
  

For races to retain their relative point values, they'd need about +40 points in Planet Buster's Mod.

Evaluation of Race Balance: Within the various species, PB has made a lot of interesting decisions, but in places the balance looks off. The Humans are giving up 100 points to the Evon for not too much. The Cynoids give up just a bit of production to the Meklars, but I'll bet that minerals conversion bonus would be huge at the start of the game, and they pocket +40 points to boot. Advantage, Cynoid. The poor Grendarl are really hurting for points--they have fewer than in Vanilla MoO, and at that they only get their full 290 points of value if they take both Superior Mining and Duty Citizenship, which would account for almost half their free points. Ouch. Besides that things look pretty good--within species.

Cross species comparisons, though, are a killer. Just look at how many points the Fish have, and some nice bonuses on top of that! The Gasbags also have a vast number of points, and look too strong even without their traditional research and manufacturing bonuses. The Silicoids and Psilons have both gotten a nice points push, but the Humans are painfully low. The Ithkul lose ground. The Lizards look pretty well balanced among themselves, but compared to the other species also have very few points. The hard-wired bonuses look comparable when considered alone, but the point totals really throw things off. Point totals are the easiest thing to change, if you wanted to make adaptions to this mod. For the reasons I give in the next section I like this mod a lot, but I can only give it two thumbs for balance:

Evaluation of Race Differentiation and Creativity: This mod does more to differentiate the races than any other. There are no clones in this mod. Everybody gets a little something. You can see Bard of Prey's influence in the Humanoids, but from there Planet Buster takes off. As a player of Lizards myself, I really appreciate the trouble he took to make the Lizards different from each other when so many mods overlook them altogether. The Ismaeis have good causus beli versus the Eoladi's better bioharvest capacity; the insects have good taxes; the Cynoids are good with minerals. On the other hand, on the race picks screen he's not so inspired. The differentiation in this mod, together with the three pages of specials in Tehom's mod, would get a perfect score. As it is, I'll give four thumbs.

Would I play this one? Yes. I could see living with these races for a long time, particularly if I could adjust their point totals.