[Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz]

SJ, my standard colony ship design (with one extra storage compartment for extra pop) costs 6150 minerals, 1100 organics and 1400 radiactives. The SDD adds 500 minerals and 50 radioactives to this cost (less the cost of whichever component I'd sacrifice to make room). Given that colony ships are single use designs and that in any game I'd hope to construct 100+ of them, this represents a significant overhead to my empire. As a human player I could be sure to not incur this extra expense unless there were pirates in the area and they were non-trivial rivals. To oblige the AI to blindly add SDDs in all cases would put the AI at a non-trivial disadvantage to human players.

As an alternative, adding SDD functionality to colony components just doesn't feel right from a role playing perspective.

On balance I'm pretty convinced that the AI shouldn't be adjusted to add SDDs to colony ships. Handicap the pirates (who'll only ever be played by humans) if necessary, not the AIs.

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Resistence is futile.