by DocCool
The thing with a round 1 Academy is that for most factions it feels as if you're not making good use of whatever special features your faction has, because most Academies are boringly similar to the Academies of most other factions, whereas your Planetery Institute opens up the remaining half of whatever cool specific stuff your faction has to offer.Also, if you start with an AC, you basically give up all hope of building your PI in round 2 or 3, and even catching up regarding sufficient spread-out is difficult (compared to somebody who ended round 1 with either PI or RL plus 2-3 mines). So these early two tech tiles and research steps better be worth it and allow you to break even with the uninspired "in round 1 we just build an RL plus some mines" crowd by round 3 latest... :)