For what its worth (Basically nothing) I personally subscribe to the model of "That seems neat and unique, lets merge it." Approach to balance.
I completely understand where you are coming from. But it really does come down to Neca's rock paper scissor example. While our current system has the appearance of being arbitrary, it does a decent job of upsetting almost everyone, which is a pretty fair indicator of a fair system.
Yes it is chalk full of balance decisions that many in the community find questionable. But it is extremely hard to look at a species other then the karma ones and say they have any advantages/disadvantages. IPC stand out, because IPC have different mechanics.
I see three ways around the Rock Paper Scissor issue.
1) Make all the species reskinned humans (IPCs need to eat fuel to break it down into methane for a fuel cell or something and have black oil blood)
2) A trait system where we can assign things points, and just kinda let whatever happen. IPC can just have less points to spend on traits then humans, to offset stuff. They can pick between EMP weakness or the change to cells. (Or they could take a weakness trait and only speak in trinary or something)
3) We could change game mechanics or gameplay to put less of an incentive on everyone killing each other all the time.
That is kinda what I have for ideas, otherwise well
I get this, but at the same time it's very bad to buff a species that was already human+ to human++. I do understand that there were nerfs merged at the same time. This is good! But it wasn't the intention of that PR. That was only to buff with "We'll handle nerfs later." when you take into account the absolutely glacial pace of Para development, it was a pretty dire outlook.
Everyone in this is right,
Yeah, we have had plenty of human to human+ buffs with promised future nurfs that never materialized, I would not fault you for saying there were never any nurfs intended by the author/maintainers/heads at all, as often, no nurfs are ever offered. I will not fault anyone for pattern recognition, even if the conclusion drawn is faulty, the pattern still exists.
But none of that really addresses the concern about how species should be handled. It just refers back to previous examples that may/may not have been the right/wrong decisions for the right/wrong reasons.
I have three ideas, the first is the easiest to both get coded and pass the merge process, it is the one I like least, but it is the most likely way to resolve this after just not resolving it.
It is not possible to just have things appear out of nothingness and into fully formed PRs, someone has to code them, and that is primarily what we lack. You cannot merge something that was never coded.