Please dont change the way you have terraforming working right now, its perfect. While the initial techs may seem a bit too powerful the result is that we can far sooner plan the layout of our worlds resulting in far less future micro management by tearing down buildings to reposition them.
Tier 1 terraforming under the present release version unlocks all tiles that are 65% land or over. That's just too powerful, and makes the higher level terraforming techs too weak by comparison. It's been shifted to 80%, which means you still get the 'full' tiles that lie in the middle of clumps, but it's a bit more worthwhile getting the second tier (which often gave no tiles at all, and is now set to where T1 was) and third tier now. The rest are unaffected.
Reducing empire expansion penalty from 2 to 0.05 has resulted in me reaching profitability with this mod around turn 110 which is a HUGE improvement. Putting Hive production bonus back to 4 has also made my competitiveness with the AI normal again, though maybe slightly too much. Leaving the production bonus in but setting it to 2 or 3 I think would be better. Either way, removing it outright makes Thalan tech terrible and uncompetitive.
I think you'll find in 1.3.2 the increase in base growth makes the LEP more manageable early on without compromising colony costs later.
Hives are OP when they give front-loaded production. With them set to 4, you effectively give yourself 8 free population for 30 manu. The point of the Thalans was meant to be that they're slow to get started but powerful later; this is what the 50% food and approval bonus does - they get much bigger populations, but have to grow them rather than just being handed vast bonuses immediately. As for Thalan tech being 'terrible and uncompetitive' without them, that's just nonsense. They get 30% extra mass cap compared to other races, and 50% more population - and that's just from extra techs. They get pretty much all the rest of the stuff everyone else gets anyway.
On turn 159 of a gifted map and one of the AIs is still flying fleets of Tiny ships. Previous genius map the AI had a fleet of 17 medium ships entering my space by turn 150. Is the difference between gifted and genius supposed to be this significant?
Probably. Once again, I don't really bother with the difficulty settings, they just make it hard to judge if the AI can actually play the game. So any oddness in that regard you can lay at SD's door.
But anyway, there's many reasons why the AI might still be using smaller ships; it might have concentrated on other areas of research and so built up its planets instead, or might have specialized more worlds on econ or research and so have relatively low manufacturing output, so it builds smaller ships to avoid spending years building each one. Different AI personality types have different priorities.
One thing thats also happening now that wasnt before is that im getting stuck on every turn now with the next turn button being a gray "wait". Saving and reloading lets met continue to another turn before it gets stuck again. Didnt have this issue in vanilla 1.3 optin so not sure if 1.3 final did something or its mod related (this is the only mod im using).
Is a known vanilla bug, not a mod thing. There's a couple of posts mentioning the same thing in vanilla. It's probably caused by the AI's subroutines in the C hitting a choice it can't make, and so looping endlessly; we can't really effect that with mods.
Altarian Environmental Optimization has the bugged desc text descriptions, so did one of the early Drengin farming upgrade texts (I abandoned the game after not being able to build farms).
Yeah, it's the level bonuses that were removed from vanilla. I'll see if I can track the descriptions down in my backup of 1.2.
Altarian tech tree, entertainment centers seem wholly separate from the next level up (heating pools). The former cannot upgrade to the latter, not sure if it is a bug?
It's not a bug so much as something I need to tweak. Basically, you can't have multiple separate upgrade paths for a building - if the entertainment center upgrades to stadiums for some people, it cannot also upgrade to something else for other races.
What I'd need to do is give the Altarians a separate version of the Communications tech, unlock their basic entertainment building on that, and then rejig their whole tech tree around the new tech. It's not complex, but it's time consuming. So for the moment, they get their race-specific version later.
I need to run multiple playthroughs with multiple tech trees in order to find this stuff, which takes a very long time. That's one of the reasons I need player feedback like this. So thanks 
