[Suicide Junkie]

Fyron, you make it sound like reducing racial characteristics is impossible.
Heaven forbid that people would ever reduce an important characteristic or take a penalty trait in order to buy something else!

Taking Naturalists in order to buy another colony tech is quite reasonable, for example.
You double your colonizable worlds, and using 60% of them gives you 20% more facility slots, 500 racial points, a weaker homeworld and you spend twice as much on colony ships.

BTW:
I'm not too worried about things like "everybody chose rock".
Empires typically put their borders at the system level, and that one player that chose gas isn't going to be welcome in most systems. You'll still have to fight for the territory before you can colonize it.

[ January 04, 2004, 20:15: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]