Minors aren't supposed to colonise in an un-modded game, but it still happens on extremely rare occasions. I also had that happen in one of my games a couple years back. It was quite weird. Like finding a unicorn or a dragon.

As for posting screen shots, you need to upload them to a file-sharing service first, and then link to them in your post. I use Dropbox for this. It's free of charge (unless you need more than 2GB space), and quite easy to use.

I haven't played DA in quite a while, but it is possible in TotA.

@zarnick. Never seen a minor craft an empire before in DA, so when i saw the Dark Yor did it in ToA - i just tried to plant a spy on their homeworld and  it worked. Same thing with one of their other planets. As you noted, never could plant spies before on a minor, i reckon the game got all confused when Dark Yor started expanding

I've tried several times in one of the very 1st versions of DA and all ways got the "don't waste" espionage effortry on minor cats blurb. Ultimate Edition let me do it this time in ToA

...except for the Dread Lords in my current DA metaverse game;  so maximum spies on there hoping to steal some of their techs.  They have rush-bought 3 industrial sectors to now.  I can't speak with them,  I've only ever been able to do that after clicking on one of the war declaration messages (at the beginning of a turn). 

  Their 20,000m population planet is amongst my planets,  so when they've finished building on it...

Hi all, I'm currently in a DL game where the Akilians currently have 12 planets. They were up to 13 at one point, but lost one to the Drengin. I usually play TotA but it started crashing, so I picked up DL again(CD Ult. edition). Playing painful, huge, 9 AI.

I'm playing a custom race and the Akilians got the stolen research event pretty early. I pushed them to attack the Yor who were dogpiling on the Altarians and were actually the #3 military power at the time. The Akilians completely wiped out the Yor and went right after the Drengin. They took about 4 or 5 planets from them before making peace.

The Scottlingas are also in this game and have a pretty healthy military, but seem content with their one planet. My only ally is the Jessuins and they're years behind everyone else.

It's boiling down to me, the Akilians and the Korx(who are surprisingly strong also).

I've had past games where the Carinoids and the Paulos have taken planets, but I've never seen this kind of domination.

I'd like to post a screen shot if someone can help let me know how to^^ 

My favourite game (it was a modded one, and I have rambled on about how epic the whole game was at length elsewhere...) featured a combination of colonizing minor races and an early mega pirates event.

Before the event, the minor races had anywhere from 1-3 worlds each depending on how good their start was. Once the pirates showed up and started wrecking everything, it turned out that their ships ignored minor ships and starbases while going after majors relentlessly. This had the twofold effect of rapidly making the minors the strongest military powers for years of gametime, while at the same time giving them a huge additional collective military that, since the pirates became largely passive once they have hunted down all player/major AI ships, pretty much solely existed to protect their borders.

This was augmented by the stolen tech event for some minors, who did very well indeed...