[1.82] Minor said I was ripe for conquest

It isn't really going to do anything.  Every so often the AI gets an urge to say something, anything, and this time it is saying that it doesn't admire your economy, respect your military, or want to be your friend on Galactic Facebook. Such is the nature of interstellar trash talk.

Hmm. Impulse control at the comm station could explain why the roots Snathi just warned me about nasty pirates when I've got them turned off in game setup. Or it could just be that special flavor of rabies they seem to have...

That is a misconception. Minors will colonize and expand if they get hold of a colony ship. The minor mechanic disables the ability to build colony ships and starbases, but from my tests thats pretty much it. They might not declare war either, not tested that tbh.

I'm all for modernizing the Miss America pageant, but this is just shocking 

Amused.

I'd call you Miss Easily Amused, but your avatar has a gun and a frown...

I also have this message under diplomacy plusses and minuses from a minor civ.

I hope the devs fix this - minor civs shouldn't be looking to conquer major ones?

I like the question mark here.

First a digressive-related complaint. Pretty much since the beginning of time (as in all through GC2 and maybe 1 as well?), the math behind the Military rating and the "ripe for conquest" values has been really weak. Long ago, I read some threads from code-and-math-wise players who soundly critiqued it, but I never managed to follow/find any constructive discussion on improvements.

These days, I am still regularly annoyed/amused by AIs that call me ripe for conquest even though my small, hi-tech fleets have pretty much eaten the face off of the gigantic horde of an AI that the game ranks higher than them. (It also remains wildly entertaining and hugely irritating that AIs will declare war when it would take them a hundred turns or more to get a plausible attack underway.)

As far as feisty minors go, I would be quite pleased to see one take advantage of my tendency to stay in development mode for a long while and actually seize one of my outlying worlds. The current AIs are training me to start fleet-building sooner than seems 'reasonable' to me on account of the above-mentioned weirdness in the Military rating and diplomacy code.

Basically, your question mark has made me start fantasizing about a major change to minors code that could have them able to conquer mini-empires (at least on larger maps) with something like a distance limit from the home world. Or maybe just an expanded set of options for the minors so players with different interests in this area could get different results. Maybe the eventual major diplomacy overhaul could include developing the minors along the lines of the independent city-states in Civ V.

I like it....

A big part of the enjoyment of the game is for the AI to be illogical and annoy you so that you can take great pleasure in punishing them for it!

The minor races when they demand things, should say things like:

"We will vote for you during the next UN election" (or similar) rather than threaten. They would likely get more things from me.

Hoping this one goes onto the devs' idea list for the diplo upgrade effort. Making it some sort of bidirectional thing, where players could also actively try to buy Minors' loyalty in the UP, would be a big step towards emulating the Civ V client city-state model.