But if the map doesn't have a lot of cosmite nodes, it's better to save their modding cost, I think.

NPC units (and animals) are useful if you have a lot of cosmite (happens to me often around turn 25) and your regular units don't have enough experience to spend it on them. For the third army I wait until I have a good city that can give them some rank upgrades. The energy from the rewards helps to build a second army.

I usually concentrate on camps, exploration sites and landmarks in the early game to get a strong main stack. Anyway, I don't think this is a bad thing because absorbing an enemy empire that early would again allow the player to build large armies and steamroll everything. This might make it impossible to rush an enemy AI early (I didn't test this because I generally don't play that aggressive). It is intended that you can only sustain a small number of units in the beginning.

Thanks for the mod again, it is really great, so many things are changed and the amount of work is crazy indeed. I am Amazon who have penalties for mountains/fertile plains, that means low energy income also. Have you tried a game with leaving vanilla colonizer costs, which problems did it cause? Of course I am building another colonizer despite I still haven't found any sectors with cosmite. I got 2 units to veteran rank, built 1 core unit, bought 4 NPC tier 1 units, obtained some reward units from quests and my income is -15 with 2 colonies. I mean I can't have just a few colonies and rely on NPC units because they will not have any mods, I can't rely on faction units either because they have 1 mod and thus don't have a chance against double number of AI units (there is no much room for synergy). Click to expand.I am on turn 14 in my game and I think the idea to reduce number of colonies contradicts to increased energy upkeep for evolved units and increased mod cost for NPC.

Age of wonders 3 mount mods