Hi I finished up a playthrough with PDO and had an absolute blast. While I am well aware that the version now is just a preview of the (unbelievably ambitious and tantalizingly intricate) tileless system to come, I was just so impressed by how distinctive this was from regular Stellaris that I wanted to reach out. If nothing else to say that I am in unqualified awe of the scripting on display here.

THE EARLYGAME: RAPID GROWTH, STATE INDUSTRY IS A MYTH
I had watched your mini-LP of the first twenty or thirty years and that helped orient me immensely. I started off by aggressively spending on infrastructure plans. Since I'd seen you repeatedly spamming the 2 yr plans basically on cooldown, and I figured I wanted to get to that 90% infra level for the +40% output I went hard on the 15 year plans.

I kept my industry in a 'balanced state'. The tradeoffs for actually specializing any planets always seemed to outweigh the benefits - esp as without the tiles there didn't seem to be a multiplicative effect to balancing my economy one way or the other. I never experienced drain on my infrastructure, though it spent most of the game hovering between +1 and +6. Part of that might have been that I was expanding fairly slow. Grabbing a lot of space with outposts and doing a lot of space mining to source my minerals/energy/research.

I never noticed the tile yield of the State Owned Industry ever shifting away from .01 in all things, with the planetary output all coming from the Capital City. I must confess I'm not certain if that was because I simply never bothered issuing an initial edict balancing the state industry one way or the other. I'm more than willing to admit I probably missed a description somewhere laying it all out. Just something I noticed.

All told as I expanded through the first thirty to fifty years everything felt exactly on point. My minerals and energy and research all felt very much like they were on track to hitting the same pace as vanilla Stellaris - I found it so closely tracked my usual rote expansion as to be uncanny!

THE MIDGAME: HURRY UP AND WAIT
By the midgame there were a few oddities. Some obvious fallout of the mostly decorative pop system was that it was difficult to judge my relative population and development level / economic throughput compared to other interstellar nations. I felt there were competing mechanics at this stage. On the one hand I want to be cruising along on Fastest, surveying stuff, queueing up mining stations and starbases, but on the other hand I need to be constantly upgrading my starbases, clicking each of the ten or so stages of development on the mini-megastructures which felt totally at odds with the hands-off style of the mod's planetary management.

I also did another colonial wave - I'm still to this day strongly conditioned to avoid Sectors at any cost so I waited until I hit the +5 core sector ascenscion and picked up a few juicy double planet systems. I think I did one final 15 year infra plan and then from that point on I was basically at 80 or 90% infra throughout my empire with the occasional brief dips into 70%. I completely took my hands off the wheel with respect to the 5 and 15 year plans and it didn't seem to make a detectable difference. Also the colonial wave didn't make much of a dent in my logistical capacity flows which surprised me. I would have thought that such a burst of colonization would be a shock to the limited (100) cap of the stuff and drain it out or create a temporary deficit but for whatever reason it didn't happen.

The biggest deal here was the effects that scale off pops not triggering. Unity and Science were a bit ahead, but fleet capacity wasn't. Enclave deals never scaled up from the base 1000 Energy cost which was lovely but meant they were effectively a permanent boost. I'm a bit lucky that I was purposefully building a heavy fleet cap build (citizen service with quantity focus) and using the NSC mod which has so many darn module and building slots per starbase that I could get a big fleet pretty quickly.

I felt that there wasn't a big enough, detectable difference between my burgeoning capital planet as it crossed the 100 billion threshold and the first ring of colonies as they hit the 5 ish billion threshold. The second wave of colonies were still filling out their tiles but that happened very quick. It's my hope that the performance gains from shunning tiles and pops entirely might enable a passive civilian trade system! It would be lovely to see an 'all-roads-lead-to-Sol' effect where all your civvie ships just naturally are converging on centers of industry or research, with flows outbound helping keep a track on relative consumers and producers of things like logistical capacity.

THE LATEGAME: IT'S FREE REAL ESTATE!
Then it came time to smash big fleets of space ships together and go 'pew pew'. I discovered that some combination of effects let me effectively zero out my fleet upkeep: quantity doctrine + perhaps the NSC fleet HQ starbase building + the Grand Fleet unity ambition all ended up actually dropping my upkeep to zero. As the big ships cost the big bucks, and my economy felt a bit anemic in the midgame perhaps due to the state owned industry never firing up, this happy accident was just the shot in the arm that let me start facing up to crisis fleets. Going over my fleet cap pushed the upkeep modifier up from zero again so I stopped being able to just bleed ships without the absurd upkeep costs they normally impose to prevent snowballing, but it was still a blast.

In short, it was still obviously and recognizably Stellaris. There was still the 'wait forever to get 50000 minerals for the next tick of Dyson sphere progress' effect from vanilla, but it permeated the midgame now too once the planets hit their alloted number of pops and there wasn't a lot to do beyond queuing up orbital bases and housekeeping all my starbases.

While this criticism is equally at home levelled at vanilla, there's few planets that felt naturally inclined to specialisation or naturally distinctive. I suppose I just got unlucky and never ran across a super mineral rich world or anything like that - I imagine various planet modifier mods might help fix that up in a hurry, as +50% mineral output would be well worth eating significant hits to all other resource outputs!

A FEW REQUESTS:
I'd love to be able to see the growth of my population. How fast am I growing? When will I cross the next population threshold so I can plan for it? Are my people migrating? How many aliens live here? How many genemodded people live here?

On the topic of people moving, it'd be fun and handy to have an edict that issued an evacuation order that tanked your logistical capacity (ie nationalized your shipping) and based on your throughput of the resource started moving your people away. Can I issue "New life on the offworld colonies" edicts to decentralize my empire away from that head-start capitol world? Can I issue "all roads lead to space rome" edicts to further devote development away from the colonies into growing an ever more palatial capitol system?

Do I promote hardy individualistic self-reliance so that my people can vanish into the wilderness of a colony world? OR do I promote complex interconnected urbanized environments that are highly vulnerable to bombardment and disruption? I *ABSOLUTELY LOVED* all the new flavor Policies. There's whole mods to be made of that sort of thing, so you could play as a species of ace corvette and destroyer captains, or Wing Commander-esque ace pilots. Space horse archers who have boosts to disengagement and sublight speed, but fragile hulls and higher upkeep. Combined arms experts who benefit from having a little of everything in their formations.

Perhaps military industries will offer bonuses to such things but it would be interesting to have ace marksmen with particular weapons systems or odd quirks. Stuff like half the damage for twice the rate of fire on energy weapons. Poor hull architecture but masterful shield engineers, that sort of thing. Perhaps that veers too far into specificity and minimaxing but it was such fun to finally be able to mechanically express a quantity or quality strategy.

A FEW BUGS:
Orbital bombardment and conquest by the Contingency did not seem reduce populations detectibly but you gotta mouse over the modifier to get a readout as it stands now. Structures would insta-repair unless a tile blocker got generated. Dovetailing off an earlier comment, I would imagine orbital bombardment would be particularly devastating to that 300 billion population world that's got giant cities and huge numbers of orbital habitats, and not that much of a calamity on a relatively freshly colonized world where my people might indeed fade into the wilderness. Refugees and migration

IN CONCLUSION:
This was such a fresh experience! I've got to give it another try embracing sectors to see what they do under the new system, and push the start year for various crises back a bit as apart from the initial burst of growth it feels like my economy curve flattens out a bit after 2260 - though that could be an L2P issue on my part with the mod. I can't wait to see what's coming next! Thanks for making such an incredible mod!