ooo...Thalans with farms...brutal. Question...once you had this farm tech, were you able to research the other farm techs yourself? Or do you have to trade for them as well?

Same here...I've tried a couple with No Tech Brokering and enjoyed the change...though in the long run, I have a feeling I'm going to play mostly with Tech Trade off. Still, its been great fun seeing the races in the trade screen, even encouraged me to make up some custom civs using the Formis packs. Damn he did an awesome job...Formis = Legend.

I don't believe it's possible to research something that isn't in your tree.

And, yes, Thalans with "normal" 10 billion pop worlds are scarier than less well-fed Thalans. I guess it's close to a 25% boost in the baseline revenue source.

10 to 8 (TA initial colony) is 11.8% difference-population is square rooted before it's factored into your income formula.

That's why I said "basline revenue source" and not "income." I know there's mildly complicated math there, but it ain't important to me to keep the specifics in mind.

Maybe it would have been better if I'd said taxation formula, then.

You'll have to bear with me; I'm less likely to edit and correct posts than normal because of how slow page loads are over the 1.5KB/s "proxy" (Tunnel) I'm using to circumvent Sprint's madness (THIS IS SPARTA) regarding Cogent.

While it's true that you'll also have an increase to your tourism income, it won't be sufficient for it to bring that 11.8% up to 25%.  My guess would be 16% at most.  As a note, no one to my knowledge has done a population-->tourism formula yet.

Which gives me something else to test. 

Farms for the Thalans also make the pink blob of doom even more effective. Unfortunately, they're handicapped by lower than usual influence bases (can be recovered by tech trade) and lack of MCC (can also be traded). Any way you slice it, Thalans with tech trade can be an influence juggernaut - almost as bad as the Korath.