While I love the idea of the Draguul getting SCP from hunting space monsters, the implementation might need a little tweaking. 15 SCP indefinitely for every baby space monster kill, in particular, seems a little high. Don't get me wrong, when I'm playing the Draguul it is totally bonkers that I can accumulate SCP so easily, but I feel that after a while my crews would just be yawning.. "ho hum, another baby space amoeba. Push the button, Lars." <squelch>. 15 SCP for the rest of the game for that? A solution which would encourage early hunts and discourage brainless farming, but also be thematic and easy to understand, might be to tie the SCP gain to the number of kills of a specific mob that your empire has already hunted. That first baby space amoeba? 15 SCP. The second? Maybe 20% less, then 20% less again, then 20% less, all the way down to 0 SCP. Same with Adults - 30 SCP for the first, then 20% less each time. 20% is a number I just pulled out of my ass but it should be enough to matter. I realize there is a trade-off between leaving a space monster up (you don't get to use the system for anything else!) and farming for SCP but for a good chunk of the early game there are usually more systems available than you can readily exploit anyway, and baby monster spawns are relatively frequent. In my first game as Draguul I found plenty of space monster spawns and was up to 150 SCP/turn in no time which felt almost broken. My empire had finished "evolving" before I even had tier 4 technology. Anyway, loving the expansion so far, more feedback as I have it! EDIT: turn 150 in the same game now, and I've seen a lot fewer baby monsters -- either their spawn rate has fallen off, or the mommies and daddies are getting smarter and not sending their offspring to known danger zones to get shot down by scurrilous poachers. Either way... well done. I'm now kind of undecided whether or not this is as severe an issue as I originally thought.
Thanks for the report and special thanks for the follow-up edit with further thoughts! We're closely monitoring all the reports at this point, including this one. Our expectation is all the Evolution sets will feel a bit overpowered at first. That's not to say anything isn't overtuned at this point, or undertuned for that matter, but we need to allow some time for everyone to get accustomed to the new landscape where every empire has its new Evolution toys to see how things shake out. Overall the intent behind the bonus you mentioned is to give the Draguul a way to get culture early on by doing what they do best, fighting things. It's less about the crew learning from it, but rather about the fact that the monster trophies they send home help spread and grow their culture as hunters and predators. The reason it is a flat modifier is to make it useful in the early gain but far less so late game. Don't get me wrong, every little bit helps even later on, but the amount of culture points required later is far better served through other types of modifiers, such as SCP per POP. The Draguul aren't that strong economically, so this helps them leverage their aggressiveness early on. The downside for this perk is also quite severe. Never being able to flee from a battle can leave you in big trouble if caught offguard. Hope that background info helps. I think you did a great job exploiting those offspring for a while. The risk of that is someone kills the parent before you do or the Palacean come in and recruit them to their cause. I may have had that happen to me....
After playing some more I think they're actually in a pretty good place. Early flat SCP is really good and a nice boost to the Draguul who should be out shooting at stuff anyway, but it drops off quickly and very soon the opportunity cost of keeping the parent alive and/or having someone else snipe it (depriving the Draguul of 30 SCP) or, even more amusing, have the Palacean snap it up, are all good tension-producing possibilities that the player will have to keep in mind. Just to see, I started another game as Draguul and I did not have two easily farmable nearby monsters protecting systems I didn't really care about -- the impact on early SCP was quite reasonable.
