Feeding the Thalan

hmm, I haven't played as the Thalan yet (still trying to get the economy down), but I understand they need some serious tweeking. If they are locked at 6billion that would be quite a dissadvantage.

I think to make a unique experience with the Thalans, they should get one building that is Jack-of-all-trades, and only 1 Building. The home world could still build the 3 Galactic Achievements, but the rest of the worlds would only be able to build this one building.

Idea Building - Cost 7 BC, 3 Industry, 3 Research, 8% Econ, 1 Food, 5% Moral.


While a little boring, it would still be a radical game play change. Upgrading this build would stop your production cold for at least 10 turns. But every planet would be above average, but you couldnt actually specialize 1 planet. Nor could you take full advantage of bonus tiles.

The Thalans were purposefully designed to not have farms. They're suppose to only have 6 billion population (except for wherever you put your galactic achievement). If they are tweaked, it will undoubtedly be by giving them some other advantage instead.

Of course because they are such a weird race to play, it's hard to tell how powerful they are since any strategy you use with them is going to have to be completely different than any other race's strategy. As it is, every race does play differently, but the difference between playing the Thalan and any other race is much bigger than between any other two races.

The other side of the coin is that the programmers are going to have spend more time tweaking the Thalan's AI than working on any other race. They has to be some algorithm put in place to decide that maybe it's better to rebuild on a planet after a certain point so the Thalans don't end up stuck with 10-20 worlds completely filled with embassies except for an economic capital which they will also put down.

I noticed, when playing is thalans lack of soldiering and farms, which got me into big problems defending my worlds against drengin or other evil races, since no defensive is available.
Thats why I simply created a thalan specific farm, its the harvestor copied, I called it MushroomFarm because they are ant like

Thalans having a lack of strong soldiering and farms is a racial weakness that I can personally accept. I just wish they had a more extensive industry tech tree so they could upgrade their buildings even further so they actually did become some of the best industry and research buildings in the game. I personally always saw them as a lategame powerhouse that were hindered by their lack of readily available soldiers. I mean, when a planet can only have 6m people tops (Discounting your Homeworld and whatever planet you build that Wonder that boosts the population cap on) combined with their seriously poor Soldiering tech tree makes for a pretty tough game if war breaks out. And with such a small population, it's also difficult to commit solders to invading your enemy; in my Thalan game, I eventually started to utilize Terror Stars to wipe out my enemies simply because it was too much of a strain on my economy to commit so many soldiers to take over a planet.

I also resorted to the terror star strat because transports just seemed like a bad idea. I was also able to trade for xeno farming which is really quite enough if you can also pick up the galactic bartering center (or whatever the 50% econ iconian upgrade is).

Honshu, you can actually get food on a third planet by researching good Xeno Ethics and building the Gaea theory galactic achievement, and you also get the Church of Valor for another 25% soldiering bonus, which probably makes good the better choice of alignment to go with when playing Thalans.

Netherless, I'm just not feeling what the race's strength is suppose to be. They are super builders who have nothing to build for a long time. They can colonize quickly but then wait around while being bullied by their neighbors hoping to get their tech up. And when they tech up their special racial techs seem mostly random and meant more to minimize their weaknesses than work together together to give them a significant edge anywhere. Galactic achievements aside, none of their standard complement of improvements seems any better than what can get off a standard tech tree.

I mean, compare the Thalan to the Drath for example. Both races have penalties to population and weapon bonuses in their tech tree. The Drath's tech tree though works very synergistically with their super ability. They can manipulate people into going to war, and then profit of the same wars. They may repopulate slowly, but are also have some of the best soldiering bonuses in the game, and they aren't working under the handicap of not being able to build farms.

As mentioned above, I guess you can go always use the terror star on the galaxy, but I don't see them being any better at this then any other race, especially since speed bonuses don't apply to terror stars.

And actually the same issue of not having a perceivable strength goes for the Yor as well. The other races may need some small tweaking but it's sort of clear what they are good at, which should apply to the Thalans as well (I'm not counting the Altarians as they really don't even have an individual tech tree yet outside of xeno ethics).

Anyway, I think the concept of the Thalans are pretty cool, especially their ethics tech tree. However, I don't see them as really being that competitive with the other races in the game regardless of what your playing style happens to be.

I think I'm going to try building the Hyperion Thingy on a colony next time. A 16B planet and a 14B should be more useful than a single planet with 24B.

I've yet to play Thalans, but I've noticed every game against them, they have a military 2x bigger than anyone else, at any given time.

Invade some minor-race planets. That should get you some food.  

I haven't seen the Thalans do anything but build embassies, and their colonies never even get close to a billion pop. If they've built a single warship since they arrived in TA I haven't seen it.

They've built about six warships in my current game, prior to my campaign of extermination against them.

They're putting up no resistance, though.

My guesses for those:

1. They build embassies because embassies are the only building they have available.

2. They run taxes very high to get money, and their homeworld morale is okay, but their colonies' morale is terrible, and they don't grow very much. Also, the AI seems to often send out colony ships that aren't full.

This is not reflective of my experience with them. In every game I've played, the Thalan have had one of the most powerful militaries in the game.

While I have had no problems with the Thalans on smaller maps where I have been playing at Obsence and relatively few stars. I very much doubt they would survive on a much larger map with many more stars. I just don't see how they could expand without being gimped by the much smaller number of planets they can colonise in the first year. No matter what their advantages mid to late game, if your opponents have 100+ planets and you have 30ish you will not be able to leverage that later advantage.

Has anyone successfully managed to colonise a large number of planets on a large map with the Thalans?

I,ve played the thalans a few times. The 6b population limit combined with weak soldering is tricky, you can't build unlimited transports with such low numbers.
When you're soldiering is weak you need large numbers of soldiers to invade a planet.
I could solve this in a couple of games by buying farm and soldiering techs, usually from minor races. Improvements which enhance population growth are also quite useful.

In all my games with the Thalen being played by an AI, they end up destroying everyone else. Not through warfare, but simply from all those damn embassies they construct. Within a few dozen turns half the map is considered their territory and they have planets defecting to them left, right, and centre. It's a nightmare.

The Thalan should have a "Hive Colony" building that gives them +Food and +Morale. Tadah.

I'm going to have to correct myself here. The Gaea Vortex doesn't actually produce food, it only gives you a 10% food bonus. Which means it's useless to worlds producing 6 food a week. I certainly have to give the programmers credit for creating a balancing ethical tech tree this time, it's unfortunate that it on such an unbalanced race.

The only strategy I can think of that might work with the Thalans on the settings I prefer to use (very slow tech and no tech trading) is to keep pressing ctr-n until I get a precursor library. Seriously, they have so much they have to research to even get started and no way near enough research points to get through any of their tech tree in a reasonable amount of time.

Last game, small map, few stars, I was able to beat the 3 AIs with thalans on challenging, though I didn't set the Drengin or Korath, just the Korx, Altarian,Arcean. I copied the strategy from the AI, I won through Influence. But the Altarians gave me a hard time since they also seem to go for influence, and i didn' have Starbases to counter, I had to conquer some planets.
Basically I think, the thalans need some food source, that why I temporarily modded a farm in, its capped to 1 per planet and gives +3 food and the +10% growth, so you end up at 9B population per planet, which was enough for me to survive.

The AI Thalans are pretty....oddly run. The all embassy method seems to work for them lol. They spread like the plague until I got my Korathian hands on them (I had two races to go through before I got to stop them). They kept flipping planets due to the high influence and eventually even had a good military going. By the time I got to deal with them, they already owned half of the galaxy in influence, but only about 1/4 of it in planets.

I was thinking the same thing. A once per planet building that gives something like 2-3 food with a fair morale bonus (25-35%), but it has a higher than normal maintenance cost.

I never even considered this as a viable strategy. Hmm...I think I know what I'll be trying with the Thalans next time!

In my current game I decided to not build any colony ships at all, since it would be a long time until I could build anything worthwhile on them. Instead, I built the Hyperion Matrix on my first colony world to give me 2 worlds with a decent pop cap, then poured everything into research and rushed Planetary Invasion. I was lucky enough to have a morale bonus on Thala and with the Temporal Entertainment built there I was able to keep morale at 100% so the population grew fast enough to fill transports as fast as I could build them.

A few invasions later and I've got a bunch of decent colonies, and enough stolen techs to build factories and labs on them without paying the unsupportable maintenance for their Thalan equivalents. Go straight for enemy civ capitals and you get high pop caps to offset the lack of farms, or if I'm not mistaken invade Torian worlds and the Harvester improvement will survive.

It sounds like TA has wrecked my favorite race. Much like DA wrecked the Dregin.

Does this flavor/mechanic make any sense? They're bugs. They should have some sort of hive building that boosts pop growth, and should have some sort of farm. They're freaking bugs!! They're ants out there that manage their own fungus farms, why wouldn't the thalians be capable of farming?

On top of that, weak soldiering? They should be awesome soldiers. (starship troopers...)

If you're going to balance them, make them weak somewhere else... (research, ships, morale, whatever.) But not population and soldiering.

Edit: And influence is their key to victory? My lord, that doesn't make any sense. Who is going to join up with bugs? It's like defecting to the Yor. Was any thought put into this?