What COULD be done, however, would be to alter the nature of the custom tech trees. Give organics organic hulls, five different organic weapon categories, organic resource harvesting, bio-computers, and so forth. Even if all you did was replace 90% of the component's cost with organics instead of minerals and made a new component image that was a bit greener, you'd have gone a long, long way toward making it happen and that's totally do able. No balancing issues because you're not changing anything really. Even the techs would have the exact-same cost and effects, just different names and visuals giving them an organic feel. After you get that Version working, later upgrades would include alterations, like organic components regenerating, crystal ones having a higher than normal damage resistance, Temporal resource harvesting facilities would produce more, and so forth. That's when the balancing act would get ugly which is why I don't recommend it as a beginning step.
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