Fyron and his resources have been a tremendous help to me. I might even write up a little ditty about what I have learned regarding modding. There are a lot of little things that can drive you mad if you don't know about them. One of them being that the AI will stop adding Advanced traits in the General file of a race if it runs out of points even though the remaining traits might not cost anything. To fix this list traits that cost nothing first.
Or by having each of your new weapons have their own weapon family number, you can mod the defualtdesign files of each race to use your weapons.
There are a lot more tips. Also use the Component editor. You can get the latest Version from
http://www.spaceempires.net Tis a great tool.