At the moment I have been struggling away in an attempt to replace the present minor race system, with one based upon technologies. I have managed to successfully make colony ships technology dependant, but getting over the basic handicap that prevents the starting minor races from building colony ships has proven difficult to the extreme.
As far as I can tell, the handicap is linked to the civ-type variable 3, not to technology-tree nor AI personality, nor minor-ness. Without this variable the game cannot generate minor races in the first places. So the initial plan has failed.
But I have learned something. By the de-activating of colony ship construction by all the major races and then gifting them the colony ship construction tech I learned that the major AI quite quickly invents itself a colony ship and then sets out to conquer the universe. But when I invented an alternative colonisation module tagged as something else, no such thing happened. But they still used the alternative colonisation module to colonise a world (with the initial colony ship).
If given any ship with the colonisation ability, the AI, even the minor AI will use it to colonise a world. However to build a colony ship, it needs to use the default colonisation module. This module is de-activated in the minor AIs, which appears to go to the extent of making it impossible for me even to trade the colony ship building tech to the the minor races (or is this just because I attempted to give them the tech?).
I have learned something about the AI ship-building. The AI invents ships based upon it's basic database, it does not build ships from the list used by the human player and does so as long as the componants in question are already invented. The colony ship module is I think disabled for original minor races, meaning that they cannot invent colony ships and so build them.
How would it be possible to edit say the constructor template to add a module that has the colonisation ability in order to 'create' a colony ship? Once such a ship is created, the 'use' AI will take care of it, whatever the 'build AI' intended.
