Yes, or at least, it's been that way for a long while. Basically, if you opt to customize your abilities, you lose any inherent ones that can be picked through the customization. For example, the Yor have a 25% miniturization bonus, but since you can't pick that yourself, they keep it when you customize them.

Whoa whoa whoa!

So when I start out as the humans if I want to stay as the "classic" humans I should just bypass spending any bonus points?

Incidentally, how does one go about editting racial abilities? I've been trying to edit the Terrans, and it just doesn't seem to show up in-game. I've been trying to edit the RaceConfig file, but nothing seems to work.

Whoa whoa whoa! So when I start out as the humans if I want to stay as the "classic" humans I should just bypass spending any bonus points?

Actually, I'm having a lot of trouble on finding out just how to get to play with ANY "classic race, e.g., "classic" humans... I've had the same trouble as described by Yellow Sign (also described in a few other threads) wrt customizing default races. But from my experiments, even after deleting all currentcustomRaceX.raceconfig-files, and then i) choosing, e.g., the humans, ii) changing nothing in the "Customize" screen and iii) then hitting Next, will not get me the vanilla humans :/

I judge this by checking the Race Abilities under the Stats and Graphs tab (making appropriate adjustments for the political party). Instead I seem to get the abilities determined by the abilities preselected on the "Customize" screen for the Humans - which doesn't correspond to the supposed abilities of "classic" humans (as read from the initial race selection screen).

Checking My Games\GalCiv2 after doing this also confirms me in my suspicions, as I see that a new CurrentCustomRaceX.raceconfig has been created...

Am I doing something entirely wrong here? (I just got the game from preorder - slow postal services from US to Denmark...)

How do you guys get to play with the vanilla races???

(And why btw do I need the option to customize the abilities of the default races at all?!)

for the easy workaround.. if ya want to spend those 4 bonus points on something.. decide what you want to spend it on. Then leave the game.. go to your raceconfig in your my documents folder and edit the customrace file for the Terrans that should now be there.. make sure you have all the normal starting abilities..then add the ones you wanted to add and save it

viola.. now just pick the terrans as a custom race instead of the "normal" way.

I did this to edit my personal custom race so they had the same amount of starting abilities as other races.

Thanx CorbieKitaal.

Your fix seems to work

I just posted on another thread which has a bug report for this:

Link

I'll post a link to this thread from there, if anybody else has this problem.

Actually, (hint hint - if any Stardock developer reads this), in my opinion the easy fix would simply be to disable the Abilities tab for the classic races. Since we have the Custom race to play around with, I can't really seem to grasp the idea for having this...?

Just my 5 cents.