So synths do not have cultural techs now. Like at all.

That's how it looks for any other race ( please note the blue arrow )

And that's how it looks for synth ( as you can see a whole branch is missing. Changing 1 or 2 blocks to incorporate influence do not make up for killing a whole of influence tech )

And that concludes in with below, having prestige vict practically impossible. Or any cultural expansion unless you slave drive everything under influence. What is the point of the challanges button in the UI if you are deprived of the tech to use it.

Please do not forget synthetic races. There is only one now, but it looks like they are left behind almost every patch. I would like to remind that they are in the game.

To add one more thing, because synths were removed from the food techs, they lost a bunch of terraforming techs because of that. If non synth race AI can expand planets with 4-5 more tiles on a scale of a huge map where Synths cannot, that is not very fun to play ( adding the fact that influence has been cut of so synthetics will lose culture war almost every time ).

Synths most what they can do now is Soil Enhancement and that is like 5 techs below.

From what I can see, 1.9 cuts synths techs with a 1/6 or even 1/5 worth of content ( or blocks if you like it ). Some changes were indeed needed ( like recruit centers etc. ), but when Patch states cleanup, I would have guessed they would be changed or adjusted.

Don't tell me that robots can't have their own culture