Ok..so I am feeling a little frisky and want to try out my new ships. I have spread my little wings and traveled to 3 different systems but so far...no NPR's and no precursors. Is there a table or something in SM mode that can tell me hw many NPRs are out there? Just want to make sure I'm not alone. If there are a bunch, I'll settle down and consolidate.
Did you specify any NPR when you set up the game (there's a box that IIRC defaults to "1")? If you set it to zero, then there won't be any more since new NPR are generated when a race enters a system. There are fairly strict limits on potential NPR homeworlds, so don't be surprised if you need to explore a bunch (many 10s) of systems in order to find an NPR. And don't forget that you probably generated 1000 systems in the initial universe, so the odds of running into an at-start NPR (assuming you generated one) are still pretty low for you.
If you generated an SM race at startup (or even if you didn't - you can alway make one in SM mode), then you can use it to generate new systems until you find one with a habitable world. There are then SM buttons you can use to create a race on this world, and do it (I think, and maybe only in 4.9x) in such a way that the computer takes control - otherwise you'll need to run it yourself as a 2nd race. I'm not going into details about the procedure for this since it's more of an expert function - the way to figure it out is a lot of experimenting. BTW, don't be surprised if it takes 20-40 worlds generated to find a habitable one.
BTW, the direct answer to your question is "you can't get any information about computer-controlled (as opposed to player-controlled) NPR from SM mode".
John
