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...a minor race with only one planet can support 30 or more ships in orbit (yet I with many planets cannot afford so many despite a much larger income)?
someone needs to confirm this but i think they get 0 maintenance on their ships Otherwise they would end up completely defenseless
Ai doesn't pay maintenance on garrisoned ships.
The devs are looking into making all empires, including human, only pay 1/2 maintenance on garrisoned ships, but it hasn't happened yet.
Sadly there is no reward to incorporating minors into your empire. Its better to let them be free and generate cash (via no ship maintenance lol) and then trade for said cash.
A nice cclass 16 +transforming, already built up, keep population with a bio invasion ... seem like a good reward to me, do it all the time 
Eh... the easy access to insta cash is better than a planet that is in need of reorganization, I'm typically playing games where, I really just don't need every extra planet. I tend to raze enemy planets I capture to increase the challenge anyways.
But yeah, all depends on how you play. Still, I wish acquiring minors through war or peace unlocked a unique tech, ship component, or planetary structure
Agreed.
Minors in this game are just another one of the many cool ideas that were added into the game, but not developed in any way. Shame they don't have a role beyond cash/tech fleecing and free real estate. I play with them off now, to reduce exploit temptation and increase challenge.
If the Ai could actually fight a war with some degree of competence, then minors (and their ships they pay 0 maintenance on) might at least be useful in different ways lol.
Minors have always been in the Gal Civ Series. I like them but they do need a bit more. The espionage event where they stole all of an empires tech and you had the option to buy some or all of it needs to be returned back to the game.
Gauntlets Race mod has some serious improvements to Minors. He gives them 3 colony ships, and they are more aggressive and have better personalities. I am waiting for 1.7 to be ironed out and will install all of Gauntlets into a new game. Currently there is still the crash bug when I use his races and designs.
I think that is already in. I had a game where a minor race showed up wich had many technologies far ahead of me - I'm not sure though if they had "stolen" all of it from a certain faction.
There's no evidence for it in the xml.
This is a new event, the faction Brainy'ak, shows up and comes with a bunch of techs and an Ideology choice.
Thanks guys, the zero maintenance is what explains it. I'd also like to see the minor races getting more attention. At the moment it seems strange, for example, that their survey vessels scour the galaxy but they as a race do not expand within it.
I noticed the main AI races don't seem to go for the minor races as vigorously as they did in Galciv2 ?
They don't go for anyone vigorously, except possibly the human player(s).
Which is actually their biggest weakness in winning the game. They often attack the human player who will be able to organise and beat them (due to the faulty power graph making them think they can win... with billions of their rubbish ships vs fleets that they can't beat) when they have puny AI players neighbouring them and some easy minor race for the picking that they could snatch up to forge a huge empire and a real problem for the human players late game. They should definitely tear into each other more and the warlike AI, I guess, should be able to make early inroads into their lore enemies.
We could even encourage human players to play the same way and have to embrace the lore of the game with penalties. Eg as the Iconians you have a 50% happiness penalty if you don't recapture Iconia from the Yor by turn 100... It strikes me that recapturing their homeworld would be somewhat of an obsession for the population...
Obviously all races would need something in balance that would encourage the AI and humans to play in a way that is more aggressive and fits the story. Of course teaching the AI to not just capture some random world then wait for it to culture flip back would be a good start (saw the Snathi engaging in that fun game vs a very puny Torian empire)!
Which is actually their biggest weakness in winning the game. They often attack the human player who will be able to organise and beat them (due to the faulty power graph making them think they can win... with billions of their rubbish ships vs fleets that they can't beat) when they have puny AI players neighbouring them and some easy minor race for the picking that they could snatch up to forge a huge empire and a real problem for the human players late game. They should definitely tear into each other more and the warlike AI, I guess, should be able to make early inroads into their lore enemies.
Exactly. Which is the biggest weakness of this game in general. While the military abilities of the Ai are terribly sub-par, it's just a symptom of a larger problem you alluded to. The Ai has no victory strategy after colonization phase. They don't make any lasting effort to forge an empire, they just hold what they have and wait to be conquered. In effect, the galaxy doesn't change much after turn 100 or so (depending on map size of course), so the human, who is the only one expanding their empire, inevitably wins.
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