priceless! :)

My favorite race:
Lithovore -10
Creative -6
slow growth +4
-10 ground combat +2

I picked -spying because the Borg always seem just fine with letting random aliens wander around their facilities unmolested - it seems to fit the way they act in the series.
I find Repulsive to be a relatively rough pick for a newbie, because a newbie is likely to be playing at a difficulty level where diplomacy is easy, profitable, and can result in winning the game accidentally. It matters far less when you have the skill to take on all challengers and win and are playing on a difficulty setting where that's what you're going to end up doing anyway. My take on it, anyway. The AI is only really schizo once you get to hard or impossible.

The AI on Normal is quite easy to run around in circles diplomatically, just don't enter any Alliances.

No doubt. Nothing like an alliance to drag you into a war before you are ready. However, it is true that the AI doesn't automatically hate you on the easier difficulties.

Funny, I never play custom race games, but I think maybe I should give it a go.

Playing a custom race can really ruin things for you playing any of the defaults - most of the defaults are pretty poorly designed. Once you get to playing a race that works exactly the way you want it to, you may easily find yourself frustrated at the flaws in the default races, even as your ability to make your "perfect" race makes the game tediously easy for you.
Voice of experience speaking here. I still love the game, but it would have been nice to see it balanced for properly designed races instead of the rather lackluster defaults, so custom races wouldn't be quite so game breaking.

rakenan, then I suggest to everyone to get corion2, the save game editor, and balance each race at the start of the game, including your own if you picked a default race, according to this list I made:
Sakkra:
add: -1 production
Psilon:
replace: +2 research with +1 research
Elerian:
add: -10 spying
Alkari:
add: Warlord
Bulrathi:
replace: +10 ground combat with +20 ground combat
Darlok:
add: +10 ground combat OR +25 ship defense
Gnolam, if no random events:
add: +10 spying
Silicoid, depending on competition and galaxy size:
add: -1 research
No changes to:
Human, Klackon, Meklar, Trilarian, Mrrshan

The race I played most, and my all-time favorite, is this one (unmodded game 1.31):
I play it in an organic rich huge galaxy. Pre-warp.
Aquatic
Large Home world
Artifacts Homeworld
Democracy
+1 research
Low-G
-ship defense
-ship offense
The braindead easymode race is this one (unitol):
Unification
Tolerant
+1 production
large homeworld
repulsive
-ground
-defense

Just expand until you are comfortable switching to research. Then consolidate and obliterate everything.

Mine is :
Democraty
Creative
Production +1
- ship to ship combat (attack and defence)
- ground combat
it's horrible. Just horrible ^^

I'm playing this for the first time these days.
I really love Subterranean, and I like the sound of both Unification and Creative. But that's 20 plus points right there, so I basically need 10 minus points as well. What kind of penalties should I go for so that I won't cripple myself completely?
Or should I just give up on this expensive combo and try something else?

Low-g and ship minuses seem to be the ones that cripple yourself the least. Also popular is repulsive, but it basically disables the diplomacy from the game. I prefer to use repulsive but sometimes I just want to tell that klackon to attack psilon for a while for my forces to reinforce.

My favorite custom race is:
Unification
+50% growth
+1 production
Aquatic
-20% ship defense
-1 Research
Low Gravity
Large homeworld
Rich homeworld

I've come to like the Cybernetic trait; coupled with an Unification Government means its almost impossible to run out of food, which cuts down on the amount of freighters needed.

Furthermore one could pick the half food penalty trait for extra points and hardly notice any difference.

Here's my broken build:

Unification
Large Homeworld (no brainer for 1 point)
+50% pop growth
Food penalty
Money penalty

You have 3 points left after that for whatever you want. Decent choices are +100% pop growth or +1 industry.


Creative/democracy/+research may sound like a broken combo, but research benefits don't kick in till later and a head start on production/expansion is MUCH more important. Hence you go for pop growth and production bonuses along with half food requirements. Go for automated factories first and keep pumping out those colony ships and freighters till there's no more room. Playing this way it's like the difficulty drops a whole level.

The money penalty doesn't hurt as much as you'd think. You're going to have so much production that you won't need to buy anything and you can just make it up with trade goods.

I think Cybernetic is the most "broken" trait. For only 4 points you get half the benefit of Lithovore PLUS some pretty sweet ship bonuses.

I don't think Aquatic is worth the points unless you're playing in an organic galaxy. Otherwise the ratio of tundra/swamp/terran planets to barren/desert/radiated/toxic is way too low. Subterranean is only 1 more point and gives you a bigger max population bonus. The food bonus from Aquatic doesn't matter when you take Unification and Cybernetic (which you should if you're planning on power gaming).

Repulsive is probably the "best" negative pick, but it does make games a little dry.

Uncreative is the worst negative pick you can ever take. Some tech picks are absolutely vital. Even if you plan on stealing most tech from spying, you can't pick the spy bonus tech. The biggest imbalance in the trait list is this one only being -4 when it should be -10 or -12.

Although early production is important, I never take rich homeworld because your homeworld is going to quickly become your empire's sole farming planet, plus a lot of that bonus production from unification+rich is going to be wasted on pollution.

A lot of the time I take the spying penalty over the attack/defense penalties. I have never had any luck with spying; the computer seems to steal just as much tech regardless of how good I am in it so I usually say screw it and take the penalty.

There is no way Lithovore is worth the points. They charge too much for this and too little for Cybernetic.

I think Creative is a little overrated in general. There are only a couple of tech levels that don't have a no brainer choice, and you can easily live without the techs that are "nice" to have but not essential.

SOMETIMES I take the lucky trait because I swear the Antarens are bugged. Is it just me or do they attack the SAME player all game? I either never see them because they're attacking someone else, or they attack my same 2-3 planets every time they pop up.

I'm not sure why everyone is so keen on Low-G. That's a 25% productivity hit on >80% of the planets in the game. Nothing to sneeze at.