I belive you can mitigate the low tech aspect of your conventional empire by setting up the game with rather low populations, and after game creation, increasing population and industry in SM mode.
The size of pre-build NPRs and the NPRs activated by NPR activities seem to be based on the player population at game creation (not sure where I read that, Kurt perhaps?).
You might have gotten it from me. There was a problem a release or two ago where NPRs with huge numbers of sensors would cause bad things to happen. I had the impression (I think from a question Steve asked) from the discussion that the size of newly created NPR was based on the size of the player empire. I didn't know if this was startup size or current size, however. In my last two conventional games, I've played the trick of running setup at 1b population and then bumping it to 10b using SM mode in the hopes that it was startup size that controls things. But it was just a hope.
John
