[dogscoff]

I think the Primitives should have the capacity to produce some small amounts of Rads at some point, just so they can support a ship given to them by a player. "You gave a baseship to the Ewoks? Do you know what they're going to do with that thing?!"

Actually I was thinking about this Last night, and while I agree that they should get a small amount of rads, it would make more sense to have rad-free, giftable "basic" techs available to space-faring races. For example, if you gave a quantum engine to someone from the Vicorian era (think H.G.Well, Jules Verne) he would have no clue as to how it worked or how to operate or maintain it. However, although he probably couldn't design and build a working rocketship of his own, he could ( given a little training) probably operate, understand and maintain one at a basic level if you built it for him. He might even be able to manufacture a few spares for it. So you could have a set of "rocket engines" and so on that are available to normal races, but aren't particularly useful (because they are slow, inefficient) except as gifts to primitives. They would be perfect for primitives, who can maintain them easily because they don't use rads. Also, it means the primitives could maintain it but not repair it- or at least, they wouldn't be able to repair the engines, although they could probably fix the crew quarters or bridge if necesasary. This would instill a real sense of entropy in the primitives when trying to uplift them to far, too fast.

Of course you could just gift 100000 rads along with the ship...

The Primitives should have superior infantry and, if possible, militia to start. This is both to keep them from being easy prey (human vs. AI, after all), and to account for the fact that they probably still kill their own food.

This is also a good point. I'm not sure about superior infantry, but they probably ought to be about equivalent. It's worth remembering that they will be completely unable to build anything other than infantry for the first X turns (until they get uplifted). This means that while their infantry might be weak, they will have one hell of a lot of it=-)

Since the Primitives are not only AI, but dumbed-down and limited AI, plaguing them out of existence would be too easy. I feel that these races should have plague resistance, of some sort, from the get go. This could be said to reflect their hardier, already survival-of-the-fittest lifestyle.

Also very true. I like the survival of the fittest idea. I'm torn on this one. On the one hand, you don't want them to be too vulnerable. On the other, realistically they would be very vulnerable. Also, although it's easy to destroy them, they would pose so little threat that most (human) players just wouldn't bother. Maybe put plague prevention 2 on their cultural centres, and allow them to upgrade to 3 or 4 after uplift. The only trouble with this is that human players would find a way to exploit this "free" plague-prevention tech.
Finally, since half the racial point selections are irrelevant to them, they would all probably have very high reproduction and happiness traits, which (I think) would go some way to countering the effect of plagues.

You could do all:

Dirt Races
Steam Races
Space Races

But each would require their own Racial Tech tree, to keep them separate.

Yeah, this would be cool. Especially the steam races, the more I think about that the more I love it. The other great thing is that because of their limited selection of units and ships, you could make shipsets for them very very easily: a few infantry pics, a race pic, a couple of AI files (Build infantry, build more infantry, yubyub) and that would be it.

Or perhaps the Dirt Races could move up to Space Races.

Not sure about the progression, unless it was *really* slow (ie five hundred turns or more to progress)

You can mod neutrals.

Excellent (rubs hands together, in a Mr Burns style)

("Damn you, little-bear-person! This does not go here!" "Yub yub!" "No, it doesn't.")

LOL!

And what about WPs? Can I gift WPs, will the AI know what to do with a transport full of WPs or will it jettison them and fill the transport with carrots for the winter?

Not sure about this. What it will probably do is unload/ jetisson the WPs, fill the transport with ewok warriors and catapults and go invade someone.

The one place I see conflict in the real-tech vs. Primitive/Uplift-tech is Intel. Real players may be tempted to use Primitive/Uplift Intel. This should not be possible, as P/U Intel will probably need to work differently for the little bastards to make affordable use of it.

Just make it less effective or more costly than the real thing, then real players will have no reason to use it.

This can be solved by another layer of racial tech. Primitive-only Intel tech that requires Uplift Intel to get but costs little or nothing to research.

Or do your idea, that works too.

Also, do AI ever use Analyze on captured or traded ships?

No, never.

Hey big dawg.
What's wrong with my proportions ?
I know I haven't been working out as much as I should lately, but.....

Sorry P, but there are some proportions that just can't be improved by working out