I'm aware of all that, and I don't see how it relates to my question.
I'm just trying to figure out why sloanjh says he gets a good challenge from a conventional start when there is no initial NPR. If there is no initial NPR, then no systems (and therefore no new NPRs ) will be generated until the player techs up; therefore, there are no NPRs receiving a head start.
Generated NPRs are generated at a tech level that's related to the amount of game time that's passed, whether or not you've done a conventional start. Since it takes 15-20 years to get out of the solar system and start exploring, the generated NPR are 15-20 years higher tech (relatively speaking) than they would be with a TN start.
The problem with the initial NPR is that, just like the AI isn't sophisticated enough to do the conventional-->TN transition, my experience has been that it's not really sophisticated enough to run an empire for 15-20 years and have it wind up in a good state, mainly because it isn't good at shifting the mining away from the homeworld when the mining crash happens. So you end up with a crashed NPR who's built jump gates everywhere and "soaked up" a lot of the precursors which would otherwise present a challenge.
In my current game, I've pretty much explored to 3 jumps out and haven't activated any NPR yet - usually I would have found one or two by now. If this goes on for long, I'll probably either generate one by hand (which would be equivalent to having a "starting" NPR in a TN game (since I'm TN now) but with a 15-20 year tech handicap) or crank up the probability of NPR generation from exploration.
John