Fairly new to the game, but I'm loving it and have already sunk 25+ hours into it. Will definitely be telling my strategy-minded friends about this one.

I've won the new campaign twice with Expansive on Employee, then Robotic on Manager, and am now attempting the campaign as Scavenger. Playing as the other races, I absolutely dreaded having a Scavenger AI in the first mission and their starting perks of a free Mutiny and Pirates seemed blatantly overpowered. As a Scavenger player it is crippling to the point of unplayable. Both of these directly transfer resources from you to them, whereas most Black Market attacks simply deny you resources for a time. While these slow you down, it does not simultaneously speed them up like Pirates and Mutiny does.

In my first round as Scavenger, I had a 1v1 against a Scavenger AI and got completely crushed, and I can't figure out a way to play around their starting perks no matter how many times I restart. My first carbon quarry was hit by Mutiny right out of the gate. Okay, fine, I'll make a second carbon quarry next to it for the adjacency bonus and plow on I thought. Then he dropped his Pirates on my carbon transport routes (I started next to Alum). It was pretty much "gg" at this point as he predictably snowballed ahead.

As a different race, while Pirates+Mutiny early on is still frustrating, it normally just slows you down or delays you without speeding the Scavenger AI up. But as Scav v Scav, I have no idea how to play around this. We don't just both need carbon for upgrades, we need it for everything. If he steals all of mine through Pirates+Mutiny in the early game and upgrades his HQ way ahead of mine, it's over. He gets his second round of claims down way before I can and is able to jump to HQ3 shortly afterwards, while I struggle to get anything on the map at all. Even if I can sell-blitz my way to HQ2, I still have almost no carbon to work with. If I get lucky and get Mutiny as my upgrade reward, I can try to get some of the carbon back, but it's too little too late as the snowball has already started. Any other upgrade reward only slows him down, and does nothing to refund the carbon I've lost.

I've thought about trying a different start and going after something besides carbon, but it won't matter because he'll just steal it anyway and I'll still be a sitting duck. It makes me wonder if this is a scenario that simply didn't come up in testing when the perks for the campaign Scavenger AI were picked.

Ideas? Suggestions? Is there a solution or work around to this I'm simply missing?

TL, DR: 1v1 Scav AI in Round 1 of the campaign seems unbalanced due to their free Pirates+Mutiny available right away.

Suggestions to devs: Change Scavenger AI's starting perks to Mutiny + EMP or Power Surge. Pirates+Mutiny is too much resource steal combined, and pirates are a really unfair advantage considering players and other AI's can only get them through auctions. While Black Market perks all start around the same price range, pirates are at least what? 6-8k of debt? But usually much, much more than that. If you add it up, it's a huge cash advantage.