I posted this elsewhere but it occurred to me that the best place to put it would be on the mod's page itself. That said, I want to say that I've loved playing this mod. It's been awesome getting to play it and has actually gotten me back into playing Stellaris where official expansions haven't really caught my interest so that's saying something. Further, as a fellow Orion's Arm fan, I've wanted something like this for a while. That said, I have only one gripe with this mod: the cost of constructing an archailect.

I imagine the intention behind the cost was both a matter of balancing its truly O B S C E N E benefits and what a society would have to commit to building such an entity but, given that a dyson sphere in this game (which is a similar, if less complex) engineering challenge costs 5% of the alloy without even including the extremely large nanite, energy, and time investment costs, it seems a bit out of scale with the gameplay otherwise.

This got me thinking whether it was possible to gate the time and investment cost differently while still recognizing how massive an advantage having an OA archailect would be over every other empire. What follows are just ideas to consider.

What if we considered the construction of an archailect to be an ascension path that locks the player out of biological, synthetic, and psychic ascension paths? So there's your original nanite ascension perk, then maybe "Chaos Control" which is a reference to Chaos Wands and allows for the creation of distributed systems and has your original as a prerequisite. This opens up access to the angelnets which you can then beef up the benefits of. Then finally, you have "Transapience" which grants a player the ability to construct the archailect and has "Chaos Control" and "Galactic Wonders" as a prerequisite (recognizing that this is necessarily a megastructure of significant complexity).

With those gates, which are considerably more difficult to get through and close off other ascension paths, you can feel comfortable granting a player access to the powerful benefits of an archailect.

I was also thinking of making a change to archailect construction itself. So following this trend, transapient construction isn't limited to a black hole. It can happen in any system but, true the the theme of emergent intelligence, how you do this influences what comes out. Here, an archailect requires planet nodes before having a stellar core. The number of planet brains constructed prior to the stellar core determines the scale of the benefit. So each planet node (which can be constructed on any planet within the same star system) grants 500 of each type of research, 50 administrative capacity, a special additional bonus based on AI personality, and a 20% bonus to the output (both research and admin cap) of every other planet node. The nodes can each have a similar cost structure to an ecumenopolis with alloy instead of mineral and nanites to represent the cost of encasing an entire planet in computing substrate. Then we have the stellar core. I'm thinking this should have a similar cost structure to the dyson sphere but with the addition of a significant quantity of nanites. The stellar core grants 1000 research, 100 admin cap, personality benefits and a 50% bonus to all planet nodes after calculating the benefits they give each other.

Assuming any of this is even actually possible in the code, I think this preserves the intention behind much of what you did while fitting this amazing mod better into the flow of existing Stellaris gameplay. If you find it to be of interest, let me know what you think of it.