The minor races are colonizing planets that are not terraformed. Are they supposed to be doing this?

Most minor races should terraform and colonize their own planets. I think this functionality was added at the last minute.

Thats right! And if your are helping the minor with colonizing their plantes, you get a little relationship boost.

Or do you have any other suggestion, how a minor without ships should terraform their planets?

Your system is just fine with the way everything else works.

Something that I was considering [before I knew that BotE wasn't open source] was to allow the minor powers to develope colony ships that don't have "Continuum Drive" in them to allow them to terraform and colonize their own planets but not to reach outside of their own systems.

BTW: The "no continuum drive" provision would allow you to build ships that require 0 Deritium. As long as their galactic speed is 0 they can only be used in the system where they are built.

well the problem with those ships would be that no matter how good their weaponry would be they'd always be outmaneuvred by short continuum jumps so at least if the attacker isn't all too surprised to see those non-continuum minor ships, he can always escape system.

and that brings me to the idea to make special "buildings" for those minors that include a better planetary defense (cause that's the only case when such "ships" become useful IMO). then in a system attack, the attacker would loose a considerable amount of ships against the non-continuum ships depending on their strength resp. the planetary defense strength of the "building".

as of right now, I don't like how the minor races are treated.

why should they be confined to one system?

I know I know they can migrate, and are still confined to my minority, but

I noticed with buildings that they advanced differently so it would be cool if you could build a minor race specific colony ship from that home planet so you could create systems to strengthed the home race's inherent weakness.

I know there might be a balancing issue with this idea, but I thought it's worth mentioning

it's planned to have some of the space-faring minors act like "mediors", i.e. something in between minors staying in their homesystem all the time and majors expanding like crazy so to speak.

I'm completely clueless about this coding bit for minor races, but maybe setting a limit to the amount of colonies they can have to 3 systems (for example) is an idea?

it would be, but we want to have an extra AI for those minors so they play a little differently to a major who is just limited in expansion against.