Can't do it.

The Custom race rocks by default. But it has no real "Race" abilities so once you touch those points you lose it. Sorry.

thats irritaitng...I wanted to make an uber trading / uber diplomacy race...somewhat like the humans but totlaly focused on diplo and trading

The in game stuff says "customize to whatever you like" and this isn't exactly true which is frustrating

Actually you can. Save a custom race. (Any will do, you can fix the abilities you buy later.) In my documents go to my games, then galciv 2. Edit the file thats named something.raceconfig. Go down to the list of abilities and edit the numbers to your hearts content. If you edit the number to a non-standard one (I.E. editing loyalty to 100) then it is kept there and costs no points. Save the file and load up the race. Easy as pie.

erm, are those races allowed on metaverse?

I seriously doubt it. I personally never was very competitive, so I don't really do the metaverse thing.

If you take a look at the default races (Terrans, Yor, etc) you will notice that some have a lot of abilities that do not match up to the selectable values. A couple have a ton of abilities/modifiers. Seems that the ability point tab needs to have better validation.

i totally agree....and if those races have hidden negative factors, we should be able to make a custom race wtih negatives

most likely trying this in conjunction with metaverse will result in a cheater flagged game.