It all depends on if its a neutral or enemy town too
??? I've never heard of a conquered town being 'netural' twoards the conqueror. Or are you talking about possible towns that are not aligned with any of the 12 human or Fallen factions? If the latter, please elaborate. The only difference I can guess you might be considering is that 'converting' people who used to be in another faction might be harder than 'assimilating' people who were just trying to make a go on their own.
...The interesting part about Master of Orion 2 was that the race that you captured would retain all of its natural attributes, even after you assimilate them. For instance, if your own race was good at research and commerce, you could enthrall other races that were capable manufacturers or soldiers. ...
I would very much like to see Elemental, and eventually GC3, gain some functionality along these lines. Some of my favorite MoO2 games were more or less built on things like starting out as Psilons with a long-range plan for acquiring big chunks of Klackon and Bulrathi citizens.
And again, I think that the super-sloppy word 'race' makes these kinds of discussions, well, sloppier than they need to be. Especially when it evokes that 'but there's only 2 races in Elemental' stuff. There will be 12 canon factions, and there's no reason on all the gods' green earths that we couldn't see a Brainy faction, a Brawny faction, a Compulsive Builder faction, etc. Whether those traits are mostly about genes, mostly about memes, or some mixture of the two is, at least as far as a game goes, the decorative bits.