It also decouples AA from NAI by removing the latter from the tech requirements of the former and adding instead Algorithmic Elegance.
There are three reasons for this changes. In order of importance:
- Help empires with few good/adequate planets nearby their HW (unlucky start) to be able to resort to Exobots as a poor man's option, so that these empires do not drag behind empires with many good/adequate planets nearby their HW (lucky start).
Making Exobots researchable after Nascent AI and Nanotech Production allows to research them much faster, and thus such unlucky empires can start colonizing around 10 to 20 turns sooner, instead of having to wait for Adaptive Automation to unlock Exobots and/or to research several growth techs up to Xenologic Genetics to access poor planets with their starting species. If an unlucky empire is forced to prioritize one (or both) of these research paths (AA->Exobots or XenoGen) before being able to colonize any sensible number of planets, this empire has probably lost already (unless his enemies were not as unlucky and know the basics of playing FreeOrion), because the unlucky empire will be considerably weak in research, industry and/or military with respect other empires. And if this unlucky empire does not prioritize those two research paths and goes for military and/or PP/RP boosts, it will still be in a serious PP&RP output disadvantage due to lack of colonies. Either way the unlucky empire cannot win unless there are other factors (specials, monsters) that tip the scales to its side. - Make Exobots equally useful to all playable species, instead of the current configuration that makes them useless to species that prefer Radiated planets (or marginally useful for such species when bad at industry), and very useful to species that prefer Terran, Ocean or Swamp.
The point of this is to avoid that the Exobots tech is of no interest to part of the players, but it is only secondary to the previous point. Removing all playable species from Radiated worlds (and probably from Barren and Inferno) is in no way a nice solution for this objective, because there is no point in introducing such strong changes in species just to make Exobots equally useful, and most importantly because it would make impossible to achieve the first objective: make Exobots a poor man's solution to help balance starting positions and give chances of victory to all players. - Increase research strategy options at start by not forcing every empire that pursues AA to also get first Nascent AI.
Making AA researchable after Algorithmic Elegance instead of NAI allows empires interested only on the industry flat bonus to skip the research flat bonus.
Thoughts?