[Zapmeister]

What interesting choices are you refering to? How do you now that all people use the same or very similar scale settings?

Of course I don't. I'm speculating that this is what will happen if everyone draws the same conclusions as myself and many other posters to the forum. Excuse me if my tone was more provocative than is warranted, but it did get your attention

In dom1 if you wanted to play in an MP game cranking up your growth and production scales to 3 was almost a foregone choice.

Could be (although I didn't). To fix that, and the more general problem of people always choosing +3/-3, make the cost/bonus of +/- 1,2,3 rise in a non-linear way, e.g. 20 for +1, 20+40=60 for +2 and 20+40+60=120 for +3. The effects should still change linearly, though.

There was an awful lot of complaints about the tax/patrol complex, including that order increased viable tax rate rather than taxes thus increasing MM.

I think the idea of trashing the overtaxed population was a good one, dealing with this issue well IMHO.

Also the positive scale effects where so beneficial that there were no reason to invest more than leftover design points into your pretender.

See my suggestion above. If +3 is expensive enough, points will go to the pretender.

Also I think it is advisable to wait with tampering once again with the scale settings, at least until more MP games have been played and there is a little more dom2 MP game experience in the player base.

Perhaps. But I think single-player experience, of which we have a fair bit now, will prove to be an accurate guide to what we conclude from MP. But yes, we can wait.