Also, if you are playing as Iconian it is no longer considered an 'AI weak' race.

You, as a real human (with real (assumed) intelligence), will always have an advantage over a programmed AI.

What "picks" do the Iconians take when the programmed opponent plays them?  Have you compared them to which ones you take?

On fortuitous starting positions affecting which AIs pull away from others, I have seen that in my own games.  In several early games, I went back to the original homeworlds of AIs and looked around at the inner circle of what had been their empires.  (Each time at that point I owned most of the map.)  I would look at the quality of the starter homeworlds and the ones close by that would have been colonized very early by that race.

Many times the races which had provided challenges to me in that game had started with really good bonus tiles on their homeworld and/or early strong colony planets of high PQ with some bonus tiles.

Actually, the Iconians do NOT have ten points to spend. They have eight. I think this was intended to be balanced by the fact that they started with more technologies then any other race, but it seems to have made them weaker (or so I thought). The Iconians are actually one of the only DL civilizations that can't be re-created by a custom race, with the Drath and Yor (as you said) and possibly one more being the others. There's also a few other quirks such as starting with an usually high PQ homeworld (15 without any terraforming) but an extra-bad "Mars" (PQ 3).

Upon further reflection, the Iconian AI probably is a little too "nice". I started another game playing as the Drengin, and the Iconians are overwhelmingly the strongest civilization in existence. They have me beat in everything but morale and economy and control about 30-40 planets to the 20 of me and the largest AIs. In most other civilizations, this would lead to the Iconians picking on the weak, but so far they aren't even attacking minor races (and this is 5 years in). While it's nice to see a good race actually acting like it (unlike those warmongering Altarians), it's definitely a weakness in this situation.

AI strength/weakness definitely is determined by starting position, although some of them (Torians and Thalans) expand much faster then others (Yor). The Iconians in this game got virtually an entire star cluster to themselves whereas (for example) I wound up close by the Yor, Torians, and Korx.

As it turns out, you're correct. For some reason I thought that the +10 economics was an inherent bonus akin to those of the Drath. I just checked and there are two points into it.

You still can't recreate the Iconians with a custom race, though. I checked and there is no way any custom race could begin with as many technologies as they do. I guess that's actually supposed to be balanced by the fact that they start with no bonuses at all. Still, on paper, they don't actually seem that bad. Were all those DL-era posts saying the Iconians were weak just talking about the Iconian AI (which I agree needed work)?

True, their starting techs give them a small edge in the beginning. On the other DL races that have real racial bonuses be overtly careful when selecting them; they can vanish. E.g. you pick up the Drath who have +50% Defenses, and then you go on and add another +30% (3pts) to it, then you won't have 80% but only 30%, and those "points" from are not refilled at all... you need to clear out the character and start again to keep them.

Yup. And I think that should have been taken care of long ago. I mean, right now, just like it is, the situation can very well arise that a lot of racial bonuses are lost.

I think it was just two months ago that I discovered that by sheer accident. Now I pay heed to that, but I'm pretty sure that in 2009 most my DL setups were sub-optimal.

The danger, esp. for new people who can't know this, is that you start a game and during the setup you select probably all races, just to look what they got, and click through the racial bonuses and by doing so one destroys nearly all racial bonuses that can't be recreated with the normal 10 pts. And if one doesn't use the "clear" button it will even stay like this forever.

Yes - though it won't matter on those races that have pre-selected points which can be re-created.

Difficult question. Ususally war is declared by the AI when the rating is "hostile" for a time. The diplomacy rating has many facets itself, to discuss this fully would explode the topic. Military Rating weighs big into it, but there are many other factors as well.

Personally I would say, the Yor. Their Miniaturization-bonus gives them a warship bonus everytime, which is esp. strong in the beginning. But it's really the map itself that decides that.

I just want to throw in (mainly because I feel that there has to be SOMETHING that makes the Iconians useful) that the advance in logistics is very useful in the early game. Having an exactly +10 logistics enables you to group two transports together, further increasing your advantage/loss of troops in a battle. Hate to switch to the expansions, but I still feel the need to defend these poor guys- The AI greatly over-values the extreme colonization and beyond techs...A useful way to make the best use of the Iconians super-ability is to secure what you want in the colony rush, then sell those bad boys for LOTS of early techs before all the inhabitable plantes are gone.