Well, having just lost another game, I think I'd say that nomads do a very good job of balancing out multi-HW starts, which up 'til now have generally been considered somewhat easier than regular one-HW games.
I'm unlocking the Military stations right at the beginning, as opposed to "when I need them", but it still gets messy sooner or later, particularly when exos hit. Particularly when exos start travelling less than sixty seconds after the nomads realign their wormholes. Seriously, was the AI timing that? No, I don't really think so, but my gods, that feeling of complete and utter doom as I realised what had just happened and started scrabbling to have more than tissue paper between my home CS and the incoming golems, spirecraft, and ...a mothership!?! No, really! When did motherships start showing up in exos? Did I miss a memo (memoship?) somewhere?
Which leads me to an off-topic question: if two exos are spawned at exactly the same moment, do they essentially pool strengths? Because this appears to be what happened. Somehow, my games before now only had the first exos aligning closely and then they drifted apart, but in this game two of the four exos kept in absolute sync, down to the second over three cycles (third cycle killed me). And that's the first time I've seen a mothership in an exo.
