Best Mod for Federation - Minor Relations?

[Ascendant]

Looking for the best experience in terms of Diplomatic game and integrating Minor Civs so they can contribute industry, tech and ships.

When I played a while back, I had tried UM5 and it was pretty good.

Any others that may be better ? - given the description above

[justanick]

Does this even depend in a meaningful way on the mod you use? The mere amount of minors does of course matter, so larger maps are preferable in this metric.

- Minor Race Evolution error wrt difficulty level fixed + natural pop growth implemented + broken evolution limit activated (based on empire research)

The Error Correction Mod does not use particularly large maps, but the changed and possibly more natural advancement of minors is something you may want to try out.

[thunderchero]

The Error Correction Mod does not use particularly large maps,

there is a patch SCT released for large maps for ECM that has some very good code changes for large maps
viewtopic.php?p=57392#p57392

[Spocks-cuddly-tribble]

I think you guys missed the point of the question.

ECM makes minor races less exploitable with fixes for start EL, EL limit and population jumps.
Plus other AI empires are better at acquiring them (they won't declare war if they can't conquer them in low tech games).

UDM makes them harder to bribe with reduced gift effects.

So vanilla and UM5 should be best choice with UM5 more interesting due to more special structures for minor races.

I rarely enable minor races in low tech games since they make the game too easy, even in ECM. Plus the AI empires poorly use/handle them. A shame since the extra diversity is a nice feature. However, playing as Federation with minor races in low tech games you can use impossible difficulty level (in ECM, vanilla with minors gets easier with the difficulty level ) and a lower starting era than the AI empires.

[Ascendant]

Very interesting. Thanks guys.

I believe I will complete my UM5 game which looks really great now in 1920 x 1080 and then give ECM a try with the conditions mentioned above.