Not made you curious enogh for finding it yourself? Pitty. Elysium Parks allow you produce Roys and Emmas. You know them from very first campaign. Hey I didnt say it would be any good/useful one but it exists! :D
Strategy is my favorite genre
Then you must see how PF was obviously inspired by Endless Legend, while AoW3 feels like something closer to homm/disciples for me. If playing casually AoW3 has its adventure vibe while PF is just Civ style filling map with your armies and colour and "Oh look some unit constructor!" If playing seriously they are similar but the deeper you look more differs you will find. Balance, ecomomics, victory achieving concepts are not the same. So how can you just compare amount of buffs and other debatable futures? Leave it to 4th part, seems it will need it lmao.
are you one of those 3-4 crazies
Expecting you to react like that. Again no. Its the first time and I actually no idea why feeling need to kinda protect PF. Anyway that proves am not only one who able to made it playable. Though there is probably no 4x-like game I could play without difficulty mods. Btw doesnt vanilla aow3 bots are eaven weaker? Not to mentioned still figuring out what's the best map settings to set.
And yes again PF has tons of problems from gamma to.. sectors? dont mind them by itself, its economics overall which is honestly horrible. Well as 4x fan I eventually adjust to it and even did some math finding best development ways like if it wasnt ever needed at all. But yea it should be pure nightmare for others, so inconvenient annoying and boring, basicall only gives you bigger army maintance.
You was talking a lot about synergies or combos creation so.
Well, firstly neutral facions often has the most powerful and useful upgrades only comparable with basic top tier ones, not to mention their availability and cost. NF units can be if not as important part of your army composition than at least something you temporarily/additionally needed cause for example you dont have snipers or melee at your own or need more healers etc. They also can be bought instantly as emergency army, sending troops to your enemies etc. Thus they are anything but not some meaningless guys.
When creating combos neutral faction is mostly what you start
From. Like Psi-fish are absolutely OP with any psi factions, Autonoms with machines, Forgotten with entropy, Spacers have bitty but strong options too and so on
but Growth are shit
And here we comes to overall combo creation concept which is not straightforward damage/unit type buff stacking. Guess everyone tried to combine prometean and lasers realizing its kinda imposible, along with lots other such missed opportunities. Yes it doesnt work. And I believe was done on purpose but thats ok. You dont need it, crazy 1 damage type stacking is not even most efficient thing imo. AoE/multitarget damage + max debuffs way better. Depending on sec tech and other factors you can focus on defence/range kite/melee rush/heals or debuffs.
Making combos is more about being creative and result something good and fun out of what you have available. So instead of fire + lazers it will be jetpacks + Phoenix Walker. That is a thing. There were plenty of good examples and thoughts from other people in this thread. As addition do you know Echo Walkers are potentialy good artillery? Yes you read correct. Despite some intersting options for them as melee fighters there is another thing. Clones share all abilities meaning things like Positron Arc Storm will be twice as good. So Echo Walkers + vanguard Miniaturized Missile Array + Autonoms for debuff and if you get assembly Echoes somewhere could benefit from network buffs on top of it. Debatably effective but surely interesting.
Need more smth stright op? Kir'ko+Celestian+Psi-fish, one of all three t4 required, havent tried yet though. Does it competitive enough to AoW3 synergies for you?
In practise its often hard to perform exact combo or not win before its finished, especially if you dont know what neutrals you'll get. Also the most op thing right now is landmark stacking(even same ones do stack) so if you planned specific units you may ended up building others for which you have too juicy landmarks. But still I believe one able to make something good and more important fun out of any possible scenario. I mean even Dvar+Xeno is ok now, what can be worse?
It was said PF moved focus to race instead of class. Not really. You have your sec tech as core thing, 2 weapon trees depending on starting race which also cannot be changed and race tree with units which you can forget about as soon as u find another race city. Or you can use techs/units from several race trees. Additionally in Gal Emp mode you can get some techs/units/spells from any other factions even some fauna ones for even more crazy combos. For not being too op there are planets with tough conditions. Also dont know is it a bug or feature but when you convert enemy units through syndicate slavery, heritator spell etc. you get unit with its upgrades and Even can use these upgrades on same units if it makes sense.
So see nothing special about syndicate purifiers, dozens of such things and you can turn Heritor or even Xeno low tier units into slaves too if want.