Are the tech trees really in development yet or is this statement nonsense?

At least UI play beta with them for couple of months already

Nice review

At this point only small tweaks are being made to tech trees....If none of the tech trees could share data I think we'd go crazy (or at least cut it down from 12 trees).

In my opinion the tech trees are very good as they are now. There has to be at least some comparability to the tech trees of each race. Otherwise you would have to learn a completely new game with each race. I find it very satisfying to see the tree and think "Okay, that tech does something like the old tech in a bit different way, so i have to adjust my play style to this." Your style of play does not get completely useless when you see the individual tree, but you have also a challenge to adjust your gameplay to it, because it actually is a bit different. I do trust in your skills of making a good game, so i just lean back and enjoy whats coming. What i have seen so far does more than meet my expectations.
The current version does good in giving a very different feeling to each race. I just read that article and could not really believe that. If the reviewer is disappointed at the end, because he does still see the similarities between the races (with some techs only renamed, others changed a bit and a few new bonus techs), i think he is just stupid and has no idea what it actually does mean to make a good game and get it balanced well. Twilight already now offers more than almost any other expansion available for other games, so there is no need to complain in my opinion. Give us, what we see now plus a few extras that make it perfect and we all will be very happy, i guess.

By the way - as i can see it, there will be lots of possibilities with the editors, so if the reviewer doent like the way the game is, he might as well make it the way he wants it to be by himself ^^

It's much more fun trying out the different races now, and play out their strengths and/or weaknesses. With an editor only the universe will be the limit I suppose. But the original races truly hold their own candle now. This is what I call an expansion.

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My preferred game is always as a custom race in the largest galaxy. What I'm looking forward to in Twilight, and this is the question, is the ability to start my custom race with a choice of any of the technology trees. Am I right in reading the pre-release blurb that this is the case, total flexibility?

In a similar vein, how difficult is it to customise your start planet? Can you add any pre-cursor square of your choice? Is this a simple option, or does it require going into the map editor for the entire galaxy, just to customise the one planet?

Yes, your custom races can pick their tech tree from the pre-made ones (or make your own tree in the editor and use that!)

As of now there is no way to specify starting bonus tiles that a race can receive    It's all dumb luck.

Thanks for the reply. Pity about not being able to choose starting bonus tiles, although I guess dumb luck is a "fairer" way to do it! Speaking of which , do you know if they've fixed that old bug where other races intelligence were defaulting to dumb if you restarted a new game with Alt-N instead of going back to the main menu.

Irrespective, I'm looking forward to buying this expansion and losing a lot of sleep again over the next few weeks!

Back from loooong hiatus from this game (cleaned/bulldozed my room and found that collector's edition metallic ship and remembered that i should start all over playing this game again) and damn i need to buy both of those exp. packs.

When will it be possible to order package that included both with digital dl + cd's ?
I know, (i'm lazy) , that you can order them separately, but still...

Keep up the good work.

Looking forward to the final release, this is probably my favorite game series.