Time Travel Ability

You get Hives (used to be Thalan unique buildings)

Well...

You will get hives, once SD patches.

Apart from this you start out with several techs:

 - Star federation (+10% production +4 administrators)
 - large hulls
 - stellar folding (passive +1 moves and highest tech movement components)

You are also able to research the dimensional military upgrades (small buffs like 10% jamming)

Not sure what SD is gonna do, but they will probably fix it, so you also get access to the gravitonics branch (+ship capacity)

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+4 admins and +1 moves on the start of the game is actually pretty good already.

Careful, I hear they itch.

One issue you have to be careful is the default constructor uses the stellar folding engine, which makes it very expensive early game. I change the constructors to cheaper engines as soon as I can 

Stardock needs to get Paul Boyer back to working on Crusade Design fixes or Brad needs to look himself at rebalancing Racial Abilities Traits.  I have attempted to figure out all the Crusade changes but it is obvious whomever was implementing the new Racial Abilities and Life Style Choices (Carbon Based, Silicone Based, Synthetic (Robots - Yor), and Amphibious (Aquatic -Torian) ) does not completely understand the plan and has left changes in an incomplete or inaccurate state.  [Not to knock whomever been working on Crusade but I have over 25 years of Engineering design experience and I can recognize a project that is lacking a "Go to" guy that people can ask for feedback or to approve changes once you start implementing the initial design.  It requires a different "mindset" - someone that can develop a master plan but able to get involved in every aspect of implementation and not be overwhelmed by thousands of details.  It is tiring enough for me to look at all the information - Racial Setup screen and tooltips and various pieces of XML code and reverse engineer the plan and look for "obvious" mistakes.  And I wouldn't care if it wasn't for potential of the expansion despite all that.]

I suspect that whatever the Master Plan was for Crusade it was never completely implemented and probably needs an overhaul once players review whatever the final implementation becomes.

That rant done If you look at the Race creation screen - Time Travels get future techs with no buildings.  Therefore Time Travelers should not get Hive buildings.

At moment my understanding is that they should get the following things as part of that ability choices:

E)  Time travelers upon building the first ship they are awarded Star Federation, Large Scale Construction, and Stellar Folding research techs.
     unlocks the Hive Buildings
     adds new Graviton techs - [  Gravitonics (+10% ship hitpoints), GravitonicSpecialization1 (-5% Weapon Mass)/GravitonicSpecialization2 (-5% Defense Mass)/ GravitonicSpecialization3 (-5% ship support - drive/life support/sensor - mass), GravitonicManipulating (+15% Ship Hitpoints), GravitonicMastery (+20% Ship Mass)]
    plus DimensionalWeapons (+5% Weapon attack), DimensionalWeaponFocus1(+10% Beam Accuracy) / DimensionalWeaponFocus2 (+10% Missile Accuracy) / DimensionalWeaponFocus3 (+10% Kinetic Accuracy), DimensionalFazing (+10% Jamming), and DimensionalFazingFocus1 (+10% Shield Strength) / DimensionalFazingFocus2 (+10% Point Defenses) / DimensionalFazingFocus3 (+10% Armor Strength)

Based on the MasterTechDefs.XML file and the fact that the Hive Tech was only given to Thalians in the base game, Hives should only exist for Knowledgable or Intuitive Ability Races.  Right now it is given to Time Traveler and Intuitive races but the Hive Buildings are left out of ImprovementsDefs.XML.

I agree, Brad has made some really aggressive (and necessary) changes to the game, but now it is time to give it to Paul to stabilize this beast.

The base game had some design errors (starbases, ..) but it was a lot smoother than crusade.

Hive Tech for time travelers makes no sense if you create a custom race.

I dunno, what's going on inside SD is pretty much a black box to me. No point in guessing whats inside, most of the time one is wrong about it.

But seeing what comes out of this black box, I am really concerned.
 - changes to the techtree on the suggestion of a famous youtuber
 - the game feels rushed... like they entirely skipped quality assurance/ iterating on their ideas (some of the bugs feel like some aspects of the game never even got tried out)
 - there is a lot of marketing effort (youtubers, dev diaries)
 - at the same time, stuff like this got ignored

I'm not talking balance... balance was never quite their forte, nor their care. I could live with that.

But the crusade release feels like (with a pinch of hyperboly) a mix of "blend it down to a wider audience" + "screw QA, the community can do this" (after paying for it...) + "lets pretend to serve the community" (celebrity youtuber suggestions...).

This might very well be the point where I decide, to cut back my involvement a lot or make my own balance overhaul (to make it a lot more like pre crusade and get rid off a few glaring balance issues at the same time).

It's a shame... my hours played on GC3 rival my hours played in dark souls and surpasses my hours on xcom:eu.