I'm about to play my first game with a full deck of minors so I'll watch for that as well.

BTW, how do you get your gamer stats/medals to show up at the bottom of your posts? If you look at my posts, you'll see mine are missing.

Would giving the Minor Races planets or Colony ships be useful in allowing them to become more powerful?

Unless things have altered in the last build & i dont think they have, gifting the minors a colony ship does not work as te ship just sits there for countless turns before the minors AI can work out what to do with it.
That said Frogboy did hint in the last chat that the minors AI might be made more 'aggressive'. Fingers crossed that this doesnot take too long to come to fruition.

The Galactic Core Forums - Home of the Metaverse Council

I have three minors on this game and the above mentioned Carinoids are acting a little different. Besides having a second planet that they had to of colonized, they also gifted me a couple of ships when I was declared on. Never had a minor gift me ships before and in a prefect spot to stop the AI's spore ships, couldn't of been more perfect timing  . The other two minors though, seem about the same as always. Not sure if there is a reason the one minor decided to do some major things, or if they just glitched somehow. Pretty cool though. I've always wanted to see minors do just a little more, even if it is just a second planet and a few more diplomacy actions.

one other way to make a minor race strong is to do all your trade with it.

Sometimes i will even give a planet to a minor race, just so i can dictate were my trade route will run.

This will only work with minors since majour races usually will defect back to me if i tried giving them a planet just for trade reasons. The planet holding all my trade defecting to me is NOT fun!!!