Dark Yor creates Mini Empire

Minors aren't supposed to colonise in an un-modded game, but it still happens on extremely rare occasions. I also had that happen in one of my games a couple years back. It was quite weird. Like finding a unicorn or a dragon.

As for posting screen shots, you need to upload them to a file-sharing service first, and then link to them in your post. I use Dropbox for this. It's free of charge (unless you need more than 2GB space), and quite easy to use.

  How did you get spies on minor race planets?  I always get "lets not waste spies on minor races" just for trying to look in.

  Rare it is....my current (DA metaverse) game the Carinoids have at least two planets and an ECONOMY STARBASE  with upgrades (I've seen plenty of minor race influence starbases);   in the busiest most crowded part of the galaxy.

I haven't played DA in quite a while, but it is possible in TotA.

I have seen several 2-planet minors, a few 3-planet ones, but never one with 4.

Sometimes it happens if a minor race gets one of those intel harvesting events of a race that has already researched some colonization tech.

One day, I will get to the end of a game and then go back one turn and:

- get the last major race to declare war on one minor race (that I preserved) if they are not already at war,

- give almost everything to that minor race, including fleets,

- and watch what happens.

I did something almost like that once but nothing happened for many turns and I got bored.

@zarnick. Never seen a minor craft an empire before in DA, so when i saw the Dark Yor did it in ToA - i just tried to plant a spy on their homeworld and  it worked. Same thing with one of their other planets. As you noted, never could plant spies before on a minor, i reckon the game got all confused when Dark Yor started expanding

In DA one can put spies on minors' planets, and also in their "spy boxes."

I routinely put a spy on every minor homeworld briefly to check their tech progression.

I've tried several times in one of the very 1st versions of DA and all ways got the "don't waste" espionage effortry on minor cats blurb. Ultimate Edition let me do it this time in ToA

How interesting!

I play only DA and have always done it!  I used to invade minors' homeworlds when they were about to fall into the hands of an AI.  I would always use spies to check for morale buildings and, if I found any, put spies on them as a matter of routine to check if Information Warfare was the best invasion tactic.

Later, I would only declare war on a minor race if they had had the espionage event and it had given them a done of techs I wanted.  I would try to trade for them but they would usually have also gained so many diplomacy techs as part of the event that they would not trade.  Thus, I would mount an invasion fleet, get it around their world, declare war, and eventually offer peace for techs.

In those cases, also, I would put spies on their planet to check for eco and morale buildings, so that I could neutralize them and make them more eager for a peace treaty.

...except for the Dread Lords in my current DA metaverse game;  so maximum spies on there hoping to steal some of their techs.  They have rush-bought 3 industrial sectors to now.  I can't speak with them,  I've only ever been able to do that after clicking on one of the war declaration messages (at the beginning of a turn). 

  Their 20,000m population planet is amongst my planets,  so when they've finished building on it...

Once upon a time, you couldn't use spies on minor civilizations. A later patch fixed that for DA and TA.

Hi all, I'm currently in a DL game where the Akilians currently have 12 planets. They were up to 13 at one point, but lost one to the Drengin. I usually play TotA but it started crashing, so I picked up DL again(CD Ult. edition). Playing painful, huge, 9 AI.

I'm playing a custom race and the Akilians got the stolen research event pretty early. I pushed them to attack the Yor who were dogpiling on the Altarians and were actually the #3 military power at the time. The Akilians completely wiped out the Yor and went right after the Drengin. They took about 4 or 5 planets from them before making peace.

The Scottlingas are also in this game and have a pretty healthy military, but seem content with their one planet. My only ally is the Jessuins and they're years behind everyone else.

It's boiling down to me, the Akilians and the Korx(who are surprisingly strong also).

I've had past games where the Carinoids and the Paulos have taken planets, but I've never seen this kind of domination.

I'd like to post a screen shot if someone can help let me know how to^^ 

strange, my minor usually don't do any of that sort... they usually just stay in their own home planet and eventually get conquered, unless i start giving them planet, but even then i would still need to give them the economic and military tech so that they would develop sufficiently. not to mention they usually go bankrupt before long. maybe it has to do with the fact that you are playing on the painful and i play on the obscene. maybe next time i will give dark yor or lentlendian some planet so that they could conquer some terran alliance....

My favourite game (it was a modded one, and I have rambled on about how epic the whole game was at length elsewhere...) featured a combination of colonizing minor races and an early mega pirates event.

Before the event, the minor races had anywhere from 1-3 worlds each depending on how good their start was. Once the pirates showed up and started wrecking everything, it turned out that their ships ignored minor ships and starbases while going after majors relentlessly. This had the twofold effect of rapidly making the minors the strongest military powers for years of gametime, while at the same time giving them a huge additional collective military that, since the pirates became largely passive once they have hunted down all player/major AI ships, pretty much solely existed to protect their borders.

This was augmented by the stolen tech event for some minors, who did very well indeed...

in my very last game my Dark Yor made several fleets of huge class ships!