Which is sad.

Minors should add a special something if peacefully acquired. Preferably something more unique than +5% to this or that, but even that would be a improvement.

Oh, and obviously a way of acquiring them peacefully through doing them favors and not culture flipping, which they should remain immune to.

I'd like to see minors be able to join your empire in a federation type system. They can stay autonomous, controlling their own planet, but produce units, research etc for you. They could be indirectly controlled through a governor/senator which Frogboy wanted to implement in the game, and sort of like puppet-states in CiV. In fact this could be expanded for your other planet: each sector governor controls a few planets depending on your political system. Having different shades of your influence colour could also add some interesting graphical flare to a federative political system. Of course this being a game you might also need to be able to take control of a planet and order it directly what to do (unless it was a former minor).

But year, minors now are a bit annoying, always asking for things they can't enforce.