[Suicide Junkie]

Take rock oxygen as your trait, more races use this, but you will start off with more planets closer for you to colonize

The numbers of each planet/atmosphere type are quite balanced in the unmodded game.

Take an uncommon one, and you'll have much less competition. Vaccuum breathers (can't have breathable Gas giants, but get more moons) and Ice/methane combos are the only special ones, but they are only off by a small fraction.

I know for sure that the AI difficulty does not affect racial characteristics or racial techs chosen. Those choices depend ONLY on the number of points available to be spent and the AI script in question (AI_general.txt).
AI difficulty settings below HARD turn off ministers and make the AIs dumber. (IE, they dont use mines, or population transports, or whatever)

I even wrote a program to edit those files automatically in order to add and remove traits from the race so that they would be compatible with my Pirates & Nomads mod.

[ March 12, 2003, 22:29: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]