Ok so I decided to see how much I could break stuff again, and went way off the traditional rails for making a custom civilization.
I knew I wanted to tinker around with a synthetic race at some point, so I picked Synthetic for my custom civs biology (obviously). I didn't want to play with Yor citizens though, that is just too normal robot looking. As I was browsing through the citizen types, I saw this cool looking new one they added; the Scryve. Not only did they look cool (kinda freakishly mechanical crossed with biological), but the description said they have really good stats. Apparently the drawback to their exceptional stats is supposed to be a slow growth rate. Well heck that's fantastic, I'm using "Synthetic" biology so I don't care about growth rate if I'm just building citizens anyways. Throw that in with the Proliferation and Archaeology traits, and this might just be as face-roll-tastic as the regular Mimots! So I start playing with my new abomination custom civ, and about 30 turns in encounter something kind of annoying...
My "Synthetic" race started getting a "We are starving" penalty to approval. Now I'm pretty sure the description of Synthetics says that they do not require food. Everything else for my synthetic custom civ seems to be working like it is supposed to work; I have no natural growth occurring and have to manufacture new citizens. I think the overcrowding penalty is less that it was for the regular "Carbon Based" civs I played in previous versions. So I'm guessing the devs just missed that they need to turn off food based morale penalties for the "Synthetic" biologies. Which kind of made me think...
The choosing your Biology for custom civs has lots of little snags like this that I have discovered, dating back to Gal Civ 3. When you can choose your Biology that has it's own perks and drawbacks, they often don't mesh with choosing your Citizen Type. There is a lot of crossover depictions of the different races, with different biology types. Which honestly is kind of a flaw in the system, since it was first incorporated.
Personally I like choosing your Biology types, so I would prefer they don't "nerf" those. I think it would be a good idea to eliminate all of the stuff from the different races that crosses over into the "Biology Type" territory though. Like don't tie things like need for food, air, water, growth rate into stuff like the race/citizen selection; leave all of those types of mechanics to be determined by the biology selection. I realize at this stage it is probably way too late to make any sweeping changes to the Biology/Citizen type mechanics, but maybe keep that in mind for future expansions. So people like me don't come along and totally break they system... 
Oh and for now, please get rid of the "We are starving" morale penalty for my custom synthetic species... 
Happy Bug Squashing !
