Here are my thoughts on the Custom Opponents. The general template that you pick "Generic, Human, Iconian etc" is good, but I think there should be a little blurb on what exactly these mean. For example what is the difference between the Dregin and the Yor template?

When picking the racial abilities of a race there should be the option of applying racial penalties as well. This would allow people to make very specific flavours of races. For example one that is excellent in diplomacy, and trade but terrible at research. Because of these penalties there should be more levels of abilities eg. Trade +10, +20, +30, or Speed +1, +2, +3, +4 since a race could have more than 10 ability points to spend.

I love the Super Ability though I am sure it will take a lot of play balancing. The race should gain something though if No Super Ability is given to it, for example an additional 10 racial points.

I am not sure why Natural Abilities (by which I am assuming this governs the overall intelligence of the race), Economic Bonus and CPU usage are part of the Custom Race screen. This seems to be blurring two distinct aspects of setting up the game. One is the overall personality of the the race, the other is the difficulty of the game with that race present. I absolutely agree that Intelligence, Economic Bonus and CPU usage are important to set, but I think it should be on a different screen and should apply not just to Custom Opponents but standard ones as well. For example maybe there is an advanced button where I can set these parameters globally, or for a specific race that I am playing against. This would allow me to do things like set all the races to a very high intelligence, but cripple them economically and see if I can win.

Lastly ... what I think would be a revolutionary feature in this game is a "Shuffle Personality" option. This would take all the selected races and basically randomly shuffle the personalities that are available (not just the personalities that are selected). It would shuffle both standard and custom opponent personalities. Thus when I encounter the Yor ... are they evil? Militaristic? Cuddly? Beats me ... I will have to find out the hard way. Oh, and now it appears that the Altarians are cannibalistic, psychopaths. I think this would be SO cool. The only down side I can see is that the personalities could be at odds with the race descriptions when you check out their racial profiles in game. I suppose users can just ignore this, or have a generic "Not available" when the shuffle personality feature is used.

Anyway, just my 2 BC worth.
Dano