Added new techs for tier 11. It still needs a few more to be "complete", but it's nearly there. The most notable feature is that various other jobs are receiving research production to help boost research for the upper tiers, since the growth in research requirements is exponential. Tier 12 will receive new weapons, but that'll be later.

The "Find Chosen One" and options to choose a coven are now agendas, rather than planetary decisions. The agenda is more apt for what I was trying to do there, as it involves the cool-down stuff by default, and it's more readily apparent as a national decision rather than being hidden in planetary ones.

Added a few more dialogue options to invasion progress and results for the Hedonist advisor, as it turns out in the late game, one invades quite a few planets in sequence.

Opulent Armada components now require the Ascension Perk to be researched. The main issue was that occasionally, when reverse-engineering artifacts, tech for those component parts would wind up randomly unlocked. It'd always be a random tier, so you might gain the ability to build tier 10 components, or tier 1 components, but either way it wasn't following clear logic.

Added another advisor type: "Hedon"!

I've been meaning to do this one for a while. There are plenty of drunk and irresponsible empire types you can build, but no advisors that really capture the feel of being too trashed to tell an alien from an asteroid (or if they are really one and the same), until now.

Realized I forgot all the trait triggers for "DO NOT RANDOMLY HAVE THIS TRAIT DO NOT START WITH THIS TRAIT DO NOT LET EMPIRES CHOOSE THIS TRAIT AT START". That's all fixed now.

Added a few more traits tot he genetic ascension options. Most notably, added a trait to combine the base leadership traits into one, and then added a few more advanced traits while I was there. There is now an advanced version of all default traits, or at least something approximate to them now.

Knids should now properly create a ship wreckage special project when their ships are destroyed, instead of incorrectly creating dozens of weapon studies special projects.

Cyborg traits are now teal instead of gray, because though being gray did set them apart as their own separate category of traits, it also made it look like they were unavailable to be used.

A lot of the late game mechanics have been overhauled!

Originally, I was doing this by having the player terraform their planets into new, high-tech worlds - "Dark", "Inexplicable", and "Specter" worlds. The idea was to try to make it feel like the player was reaching into what makes the ancient people special: that your own people gradually become surrounded by this invisible, difficult to explain technology, and it would be very easy to sort of lose track of it and how it works. The plants just grow themselves, alloys appear from nowhere, and it's paradise, but if for some reason enough experts failed to materialize, eventually you'd just lose it all. All tech is somewhere in "dark space", and nobody can reach it anymore.

Terraforming the planets does capture that feel, but game mechanics wise, it did it all at once, almost violently. You'd unlock the terraforming tech and then, one after the next, just upgrade every planet and habitat and suddenly have your output in all categories explode to unbelievable levels. Getting to those terraform techs before your friends would pretty much determine who's going to win a friendly score-based victory, because it represents three or so tiers of advancement all at once. The issue couldn't really be solved by tweaking the numbers, because every benefit came as a result of just the one tech.

Not only that, it was a bit obnoxious to upgrade planets and then wind up dealing with the fallout of now having a bunch of districts which cost dark matter in upkeep. There aren't any tooltips warning it's going to happen, so it's blind-siding the first time.

More than one person did raise the point that even if having special planets feels cool and very advanced, it invalidates every other planet type. Whether you're playing hyrdocentric, life-seeders, or using a mod just to add more planet types, the end game is that you convert all your planets into super planets. And, because my planets have their own unique districts, they locked players off from anything those districts weren't built to be considerate of, such as special leader traits, or converting from a modded world that had gas extractor districts only to lose those and be forced into minerals/power/farming/industrial options.

So although it's less overtly transforming your empire, the late game techs now offer buildings and tech modifiers which increase the overall production and research speed of your nation. In testing, I find that I get to Specter tech in roughly the same amount of time, likely because although the new bonuses are less severe, they're coming in piece-wise earlier on and thus helping you get on to the next tier. You get to keep whatever types of planets you're using, and it's much easier to predict what impact the buildings will have on your empire, and how much maintenance they will cost.

These buffs and modifiers are almost universally percentile-based, which also naturally makes them less explosive because going from 100 to 120 research from a 20% bonus is a lot, but going from 300 to 320 research from increasing a 200% bonus to a 220% bonus is only a 9% marginal increase. You can stack up a lot of iterative percentile increases and the marginal growth gets smaller every time. That said, it does get rather slow once the player enters Specter Techs, which are not as well fleshed out as the current Dark Techs are (they now have more than 18 techs in every tier!), but I plan to add to Specter Techs going forward, and that process will be less onerous than the planetary method was, since now I won't have to make new entries for all the different districts and terraforming options when going to the next tier.

Should have double-checked that last patch. "It's just a few numbers being swapped, there shouldn't be any problems". NOW it's fixed.