This seems like a change that was done in 1.03 for entrenchment, however it seems that the game will minidump against an AI if a player_XXXX.entity does not have at least one frigate on the first 'frigate' page that has the line
frigateRoleType "Colony"
in it. I may be mistaken that this is an absolute requirement, however I did change the tech colony ship to a non-colony roletype and recieved an instant crash and also when on a custom race had no colony ships availble and received a minidump when playing against an AI of that race.
If this is a reqirement for the AI I understand it, however what other types are required by the AI? undocumented requirements like this make modding very frustrating as we have no easy method of debugging mods that are being updated to new versions. I would encourage the IC devs to please inform us of these types of requirements. (or not have magical constants/cases in their code
)
my original intent was to assign a custom race a large colony cruiser and not give them a small colony ship, thus delaying the races expansion until they had built up to larger ships, obviously the same could be done by research, but in this case the ship did not make sense as a frigate.