These are all TA Thalan tips-I've tried to keep very slow tech in mind, but as I rarely if ever play it, it's difficult to understand exactly how much things are different.

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First, decide whether you're building ships only from your homeworld, or from your homeworld and one other planet.  (Colony, constructor, survey-colony should be homeworld only if only because it's the only thing with enough pop/pop growth to handle that.)

This will determine whether you place the hyperion matrix on the first class 11 or higher planet you run across, or if you simply place it on your homeworld to get more of a headstart.

Secondly-see that miner you get by default?  You're going to use it as a miner, rather than upgrading it into a colony ship like all the other races.  Those 12-15 industry are a godsend, even if it does take 15 weeks to get them all up and running.

Thirdly-it may be worth your while, depending on your planet settings/galaxy size, to start out building a miner or two, so that you can get your asteroids in your home system up and running that much sooner.  If it saves you as little as 5 or 6 turns it's worth it-if not, just go straight to colony ships.

It may even be worth your while to upgrade your initial colony ship into a miner, but that may be going a bit too far for some.

If you can't manage to trade for farms you're going to want to beeline to stock markets and build them everywhere you can.

Finally-play something else and throw the Thalans in, then trade for their tech.    Unfortunately, they're somewhat disappointing in TA, particularly when one considers how dominant they could be in DA.

Also, if you like, the pink blob of doom strategy is always worth a laugh.  Just spam embassies.

One other thing-are you looking at playing the Thalans themselves, or simply using their tree?

Consider taking +2 speed either way and using small hulls from interstellar construction-going custom leaves you another 7 points, 4 of which will grant you a 50% military production bonus (17% more than stock Thalans).  The inherent social from stock Thalans is nice but not really necessary, as you won't be building much during your rush.  They do however get a nice amount of starting techs, including xeno biology and interstellar construction.  Industrialists are nice for the rush, but Federalists or Technologists might work out better in the long run.

I almost always change my starting miner to a colony ship. But I'm not a maximizer in a strict sense and I really like having a good 'outpost' world as early as I can in a game. I also *never* build the Hyperion Matrix on my homeworld b/c 32 billion pop is just more than I like to manage. (I might make exceptions if there's a %700 research tile on my homeworld, but I haven't seen that in a looong time.)

Sounds to me that if score's not your #1 goal, you should look to tech trading to help you get some infrastructure going while you make the long haul up the Thalan production techs. I play on normal tech speed, and I still typically have some level of factories, or even Manufacturing Centers, well established before I finally research Manufacturing Matrix I.

In my last game, I actually found my desire to increase resource mine output gave me the final push to start down that research branch. I think that if I was playing with slow research, I probably wouldn't ever build Matrix I improvements because their maint-to-MP ratio is so bad, and if trade was good to me, I'd probably see most of my prodution coming from Manufacturing Centers even at the end game because they are barely less efficient than Matrix III.

yeah I read your post a while ago, it's nice thank you for providing a direct link I reread it again and somehow I forgot some things

and by the way I'll probably choose a custom race with thalan tech tree because the thalan race abilities & super power means that they are just kicking themselves in the foot

1st their super ability allows them to construct factories faster which is useful for the beginning and middle of the game BUT they don't have any factory to start with ... so there's a reasonable chance that this advantage gets lost

2nd their race abilities are inferior to most other races in terms of overall points