Racial Traits, Discussion on Pro's/Con's.

[Will]

Well, my Favorites for Tech Traits would be as follows, in order:
Organic
Temporal
Religious
Crystalline
Psychic

Organic is first mainly because there are so many advantages. The cost is spread between minerals and organics, reducing build times, and making it cheaper if your production is handled by Monoliths. The weapons are a bit powerful, with the Enveloping Acid Globule statistically outpreforming Wave Motion Guns (2 turn reload v. 3 turn), Lightning Ray is best close-combat weapon IMHO, and the Parasites give you a whole lot of seekers, fast. The Gestation Vats and Replicant Centers play a big part in my strategy of integrating enemy populations, especially those that breathe different atmospheres. And the armor rules

Temporal has the Events Predictor, with 30% (!!!) combat bonus, making defense fleets pretty **** tough (30% + 20% ship + 20% fleet). There's also the Temporal Space Yard, 50% faster than normal yards. As for weapons, they're excellent for shield-happy opponents, with the Shield Accellerator and Time Distortion Burst. Tachyon Cannon is a fairly good long range, high power weapon.

Religious has the Shrines, which can be obtained relatively early, and give huge bonuses for a growing empire. Nature Shrine will slowly improve homeworld values (and thus production), War and Death Shrines provide good defense (+15% to combat and weapon damage), Time Shrine gives nice production bonuses that would otherwise have to wait for Computers lvl 4. And Fate Shrine... you don't really see benefits for that, and difficult to test And, of course, the Talisman.

Crystalline's advantages are from the armor-piercing weapons, and the facilities (which I don't remember the names of). One reduces maintainance, nice to beef up defensive/building fleets. Other provides extra shielding to all things in the system, Last I checked that included fighters Shard cannon and crystal torp are nice, but need to be beefed up a bit to make them a match for other weapons.

Psychic... I just don't really like it too much The Psychic training facilities are nice to make quick-training centers (Planet, two moons, all three with normal training facilities, and the psychic ones somewhere in-system). TK projector and Mental Singularity are mediocre weapons, IMHO, and the only really powerful weapon would be the Allegience Subverter, which can easily backfire (I remember taking a Psychic AI fleet of 30 with one insurrectioned ship, Allegience Subverter chain reaction).

Non-Tech traits that I like are Tiny Race (+20% planet space), Propulsion Experts (just one more move...), and Natural Merchants (habit from SE3, actually).

Oh, side note... I think Temporal and Crystalline were made for each other. That combo ties Organic.