Is it just me, or is the rarity of G.W. tech really, really wonky?

I've been playing a bit of Galactic War lately and something crossed my mind.
Basically, right now I'm going through my second game, and I've noticed a strange difference in tech.

My first game was on normal just so I could get back into "the zone" of playing PA (it's been a while since I played) in this one I barely got any tech storage increases and I didn't get any advanced units until I destroyed a second faction, since it was on normal the experience wasn't painful but it was still pretty annoying.

My second game, however which is on hard I haven't even destroyed a faction leader and already have advanced orbital, complete vehicles, efficiency tech and 7 tech slots, and as such I'm burning through commanders like they were nothing.

Something about this doesn't feel right

Yeh it does seem pretty random. I've had that a few times, but at the end of the day it makes you have to manage in some strange situations which certainly helps familiarise yourself with some tactics and tech that you wouldn't ordinarily use in a proper game with access to full tech.

The thing is - if that's what you want, you should be able to select a really high difficulty level and get that. And if you'd rather things were less insane, you should be able to select a lower difficulty and get that too.

Now that I think of it, perhaps there could be a game setting independent of difficulty, called "upgrade usefulness", which uses a ranking of situational upgrade values (i.e. you want to have either superweapons OR advanced orbital, you want to have at least one T2 tech, you want efficiency tech, you want a certain amount of slots at a given level of progress, etc.), and it adjusts the probability of each tech drop to either make things more reliable, or make things more unusual.

The simplest fix that's still practical at this point would be to show which tech is present at each system. That puts an element of strategy back into GW and allows people to re-roll the GW map if the available tech looks like it won't be enough to win.

Galactic War isn't perfect, but is getting better over time

I've had a lot of unwinnable games at hard because I simply couldn't get tech 2 stuff or superweapons to counter stalemates. Now that superweapons are included with tech 2 engineers it makes the game better I guess. But I haven't played that much Galactic War since the release build.

It seems like the allied sub commanders have been disabled too, or they have had their frequency of showing up dulled right down that it's almost impossible to get them now. I've been testing to get them for a lil while now and no show.

From the latest stable update notes: "Galactic War: Sub Commanders should appear again, though still rare." Were accidentally disabled I guess

Ah! Thanks! I did ask in the build notes section and one of the devs said it was fine haha.

I noticed a few builds ago I would never get a sub com in galactic war. I started an absurd difficulty galactic war today on the 1.0 release and got a sub commander twice out of exploring around 8-10 systems. Also, I noticed you can't have more than one sub commander (due to duplicate tech) unless I needed to free up a slot (which I didn't have since I was running the bionic build).

Another thing I thought was odd that I noticed. I played one game with a sub com and it literally sat there the whole game and didn't build a single building. Is that because I had been playing on absurd difficulty?

Complete vehicles was one of the first things I got.
The thing that I realized later when I got back into my war month later, is that I don't need vehicles and complete vehicles at the same time. It sounds obvious to me now, but when I had zero experience with the game, I had no idea. Perhaps game should offer you to replace basic tech with complete tech if possible? Or suggest somehow that you only need better tech, if there are some other cards that are straight upgrades.

Haven't completed my first run tho, yet.