Also, when leaving out the ship designs, you make your empire (more) compatible with certain mods, meaning that you can transfer the empire with the three descriptions (which I tend(ed) to fill with large batches of background information, I'm such a background junkie) to another mod without having invalidated designs.
Of course, you'd have to leave the race customization (i.e. traits & advanced traits) to a minimum level, as, for instance, a STM race with STM advanced traits would cause Adamant to choke. Also, some mods modify the maximum settings on the trait sliders, so you can't set Aggressiveness to more than 115% or 125% or so.
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