I think you can do that by giving them another AiPersonality. At least, you can turn a StockRace into a Minor, and I see no reason why it wouldn't work the other way round, too.

My understanding (I can't find the thread or two that discuss it at the moment) is that you need to 1) change their personality to that of a major (which, just for the record, is a modification to a game file, and will trip an MV cheat flag), and 2) quicksave and reload very early in the game (first turn, I think).

I'm not entirely clear on why the second part is necessary-nor that I'm remembering it correctly.  If I run across the threads in question, I'll link them.

What Maiden is saying is that changing the personality tag makes them act like minors, so changing the minors' ought to make them act like majors.  There's no switching or changing involved-they still show up in the same places in the foreign relations tab, and the minors still don't get to come to the UP meetings.

qrtxian, if you manage to get this to work I'd like to know how the (Major)Minors behave in the Colonial Rush. As you can see from the customrace.xml they have a real high MilProd-bonus... once all starting bcs are drained they should be able to outpace every other StockRace with that.

Before the first war was declared by anyone, they had 2 planets.

In fact, the first war was declared against them. Their home planet was taken by the Yor, but it seems that they do not have the range to attack the second planet. I saw a fleet close by, but they just sat there for several turns then went back to their own territory.

Am I sure they colonized a second planet? Well, I did not see a colony ship. But in the first few weeks of the game I came across them, and they only had the one planet (of this, I am sure). Then sometime later I noticed that they had a second planet. The first planet had the larger icon of the home planet, and the second had the smaller icon. And when the original home planet was captured by the Yor, the capital reverted to the second planet.

I have seen, in many games, minor races with more than one planet. I have seen them send troop ships to invade other planets, and capture them. It does not happen very often, but it does happen.

I just wish I knew how to make them do it more - to be more aggressive.

In the earliest versions of DL it happened a lot more. A minor would show up and all but take over the galaxy. It frustrated the he!! out of me, at the time.

Too bad that those kinds of things were so severely edited out. They made for some very interesting game play. But instead of simply reducing the effect, the devs decided to get rid of them altogether.

Or they could have bought one, I guess.

I would like to see it more often.