Yeah - I find it annoying myself, simply because the major/minor dichotomy is so arbitrary. One of the relatively few things I don't care for.

Jonnan

Replying to myself, hmm . . .

Anyway, I actually did some playing around with the minor races and managed to bring them up to speed with the majors.  I changed their personality to 11 (same as Generic, Korx, and a couple other races) and gave them super abilities, max AI abilities, max CPU usage, and gave them a financial resource setting which I left at 100 (financial resource is a measure of how much tax income they get relative to the player, in percent, and is set by the difficulty level).  Not sure if the financial resources will actually change for the minors, but I moved it from the major races to the minors along with the other stats.

I did some playtesting with the Ctrl-U cheat and had fun watching the minors pound out colony ships and expand with the rest of them.  The Super Dominator and Super Organiser abilities worked fine - imaging my disappointment when every neutral civ declared war on my for picking on the Carinoids!  I didn't play long enough to see how they'd act in the later game, but it looks like they're behaving like majors except that they aren't in the influence game.  It looks like the minors are hard-coded to not project influence, and the IP ratios for all their planets are stuck at 99,999.00, as opposed to the 0.25 required to flip.  I guess that may make them a bit too powerful, but I still need to try it out.  I'm thinking of taking away the super abilities to balance it and make a difference between major and minor.

That's all I've done so far.  Could this be a return of the significant minors?  Looks like I have something to focus my next AAR on . . .

Agreed.  Given their immunity to influence, I figured taking away the super abilities would help distinguish them from the majors.  Also, their racial bonuses are pretty low and they don't have customization points.  I don't know if the AI would properly use the customization points for minors, so I was thinking of giving each minor some small bonuses and leaving it at that.  Oh, and I wanted to set their political parties so they're not all just Federalist.

I tried again last night, but couldn't replicate my results.  I finished modding the minors so they each had their own super ability, political party, personality, and all that, but when I playtested they didn't do any colonization.  I don't know what the magic is.  One game they weren't, then suddenly they were, then they stopped the next game.  I'm going to test some more tonight to see if I can get consistent behavior from them.

So far no luck.  I have no idea what I did to make the minors colonize in that one game.  I had just given up on them, figuring that there was something hard-coded against building colony ships, then I tried a game and suddenly they were colonizing like mad!  I had the Akilians and Carinoids fully modded, but the others were only changed to have AIPersonality 11.  There has to be something holding them back, but I can't figure it out.  Yet.

It's interesting to note that they'll use colony ships that you give them just fine.  They won't build their own, though. Even if you take them over using Ctrl+Shift+Z and set them up to build colony ships, they won't use the ones they build.

Edit - Of course, no sooner do I post this than I go back to try again and now they're colonizing.  I was messing with the cheats, but I didn't do that last time.  Let's try again . . .

So I have 2 games going with the same conditions.  In one game, the minors started colonizing around september, in the other they haven't started yet.  In the colonizing game, I gave the Carinoids and Akilians a bunch of colony ships so they took some planets.  I then designed a different colony ship for the Carinoids.  Right after that, they all started going at it.  I don't think it was the ship, though.  Tried it on the second game.  Sigh.  Better luck tomorrow.

PS - In the very first game where they colonized, it was right away with no prodding from me.  So I'm not sure what could be the trigger.

Problem solved!

After hours of frustrating trial, I've figured it out.  All you need to do is reload your saved game.  That's right, start, immediately quicksave, return to main menu, then load quicksave.  I stumbled on this while testing because I saved, edited the raceconfig.xml, then reloaded.  Bam!  Minors colonizing.

I checked the debug to see what's up and it was interesting.  When starting a game, it says

Debug Message:  Creating Civs
Debug Message:  Terran Alliance: Intellence -> 80
Debug Message:  Drengin Empire: Intellence -> 80
Debug Message:  Altarian Resistance: Intellence -> 80
Debug Message:  Arcean Empire: Intellence -> 80
Debug Message:  Creating Civs... Done
Debug Message:  Updating ZOC.
Debug Message:  Creating 8 minor races

When loading a saved game it says:

Debug Message:  Loading player civ Terran Alliance
Debug Message:  Loaded Civ Drengin Empire who has intelligence 80
Debug Message:  Loaded Civ Altarian Resistance who has intelligence 80
Debug Message:  Loaded Civ Arcean Empire who has intelligence 80
Debug Message:  Loaded Civ Akilians who has intelligence 85
Debug Message:  Loaded Civ Carinoids who has intelligence 99
Debug Message:  Loaded Civ Scottlingas who has intelligence 95
Debug Message:  Loaded Civ Jessuins who has intelligence 90
Debug Message:  Loaded Civ Paulos who has intelligence 86
Debug Message:  Loaded Civ LentzLandians who has intelligence 83
Debug Message:  Loaded Civ Dark Yor who has intelligence 90
Debug Message:  Loaded Civ Snathi who has intelligence 92
Debug Message:  Loaded Civ Pirates who has intelligence 1

I'm guessing that the game creates them as minors, and that's how they act until you save.  When you load the game, it must reference the raceconfig.xml.  I mean, it uses the raceconfig to set them up, since they'll have any super abilities, race bonuses, and description mods you make.  There must be something in the startup that designates minors as AIPersonality 5, but when you load a game it references the raceconfig and uses whatever you have there - AIPersonality 11 in my case.

Anyway, that's it.  I don't know if it could ever be fixed, but it's easy to work around.  Just start a game, quicksave, then reload.  Instant modified minors.  I gotta run now, but I'll drop back for discussion on modding them up.  It's pretty easy to do.

Far from me to claim i was there first... but in X-Worlds, the Minors are far from being pointless since their "behavior" depends a lot more on the altered values than whatever function loops were hard-coded by default.

Consider this;

 - Once triggered by an intervention from YOU (the human player) through tricky diplomatic trades, they will react as if they are Majors with one single exception -- Colonizing; but that too can be arranged *indirectly* since i've seen them grab a planet in their systems a few times from a dealt ship by an AI Major.

- Given the proper modded Party, they can compensate a few weaknesses also.

- The key figure is Logistics, the next twist is partly made off two ability boosts; Social & Research.

- Finally, their customization points while being stuck at Zero aren't a clear handicap anymore since with that many 'data variations' even their Homeworld is rapidly becoming a fortress.

Feeding them some power helps... but once in awhile, GOD or the Ducks can fleet out an extremely tough wave of tricky ships and won't give up on anyone.

While I am still uncertain whether or not it continues to be a problem I can give you some advice on how to test it.  Use the cheat to switch yourself to the active player on the minor.  When controlling the minor see if your range restrictions make any sense at all and then see if they make sense for one of the majors instead.  You may notice you can traverse the whole board if it is tied to a big major or not move at all if the major died out.  This explains the weird stuff minors used to do such as grab a resourse WAY outside the range they should have or stop moving ships around for seemingly no reason (When actually the major they were tied to died out).

I'm working with the latest TA 2.02

I've been testing a bit and gotten some interesting results using cheats to see the whole map and take over races.  I'm using an immense galaxy with 4 majors, myself included, and 8 minors.  I've got a -100 range penalty to all, so our range bubbles are fairly small.  For minors, the first clue that something is off is that it doesn't show you your range bubbles on the mini map like it does for the majors.  So, you have to look for the lines on the main map.  Of the 8 minors, I could only find the range lines for 4 of them.  The other 4 had no range lines anywhere on the map.  All 4 of the range lines I found were tied to majors.  I think it was 1 to each of the 4 majors.  Of the 4, 2 of the minor's homeworlds were within the range limit and all their ships were currently within the limit,  The other 2 minors were outside their apparant range lines, but their ships seemed to be functioning normally and at least one had colonized a planet near the homeworld, also outside the range.

Not quite sure what to make of it, but from 1 year of game play it doesn't seem to be affecting their behavior.

I usually reload the game every so often anyways, due to the majors 'stopping colonization'. I have noticed the Thalan do this, Drengin (due to the fact their personality trait is coded to 'fear the influence')... they stack up tons of transports on their planets and they won't leave. A reload sometimes fixes this to make them actually use their transports. As far as I'm concerned, somethings 'bugged up' in the game, certain AI personalities forget what they are doing, quit doing stuff altogether, don't move their ships, don't build... Sometimes a reload is the only thing that helps.

@ galacticdoom:

Good idea wih the reloading.  I'll make a point to refresh the game every dozen turns or so must to jump start the AI and see how that works.  I haven't yet played an actual game with modified minors, but I'll be doing an AAR when I do.

That's one of the things I really liked about GCI - the off chance that a minor civ might "grow up" to be a major power.  I often propped up minors against powerful majors just to tie them up.  I don't do that much in GCII, mainly because the stock minors are so staggeringly incompetent that it never works.  There just doesn't seem to be the variety, like the I-League or the Fundamentalists.  I loved when they would pop up and become major powers in their own right.  With modified minors I changed their descriptions to something more respectable; some of them were just too much to take.  I also changed the portraits for the Snathi and Lentzlandians.  No more E-V-I-L space squrrels or posh socialites roaming the stars.

So can someone make a guide or something that puts exactly which steps are more or less necessary for minors to expand?

Not much time, so here's a quick and dirty guide.

1) Edit raceconfig.xml

2) Start game, but don't play

3) Immediately Quick Save

4) Load Quick Save

5) Play.

In detail:

1) Edit raceconfig

Find it at: C:\Program Files\Stardock\TotalGaming\GalCiv2\Twilight\Data\English\raceconfig.xml, right click and select [Edit].  That will open it in Notepad.  Scroll down and notice the pattern of each civ being listed with its abilities.  Scroll down until you find the minor civs.  Notice how each has the entry <AIPersonality>5</AIPersonality>.  AIP 5 is pretty much stupid  mode.  All the majors use a different personality.

The basic idea is the change the <AIPersonality> from 5 to 11 and add a few key lines from the major profiles, specifically the: