Yea, using this makes Maso and Obscene so easy it's pathetic. If I use this, I take all the AI's BC in bunches of 100 (usually costs 200-400 IP per 100 as Terrans), up until the last 150BC the AI has (then it costs much more, you are better off trading for smaller amounts of BC per turn). You can take all their scouts, defenders... Certain techs they will not trade for though, and those are the ones they say they 'worked very hard to get, blah blah'. Most all other tech's are fair game (for example, getting Fusion Power Plants for 300 IP is crazy cheap). You can concentrate on the initial colony rush and not have to worry about your economy for the first 2 or 3 years since every 3-5 turns you can reap in a load (hundreds or even thousands) of BC, new tech's, scouts, and defenders. Especially since higher difficulty means AI gets larger econ boost, and they will have that much BC laying around.
Sure you will miss the exciting UP vote, but who cares, most of the time your IP won't make too big a deal anyway on higher difficulty.
Not only that, play a high difficulty game without the Terrans and Torians (as AI), and since all the other Civ's won't expand very well at all (as of 2.02), There probably wouldn't be much a way to lose, since you can casually send out your colony ships and still claim most every world.
