Okay, so the story thus far. After reading about moding the game I put a multiplied of 10 on supply and each capital ship research level gave you another 5 capital ships. Nice!

I then setup a team game with myself, a researcher AI and 2 teams of random hard AI consisting of 4 each.

Then we all got together on a fraking huge 200 planet 1 star system with every planet having a 100% chance of having natives setting up camp. This was to give the AI and myself as much flexibility as possible as well as much of a challance as possible. Also the map was quite huge so phase lanes took a long time to navigate.

Things did not go according to plan.

Firstly (possible bug), my stupid AI friend decided that after taking over a planet he would not finish taking out the defences which kept attacking his instalations. So the gauze cannons and fighters/bombers kept striking his installations and I got a warning about every minute about his planet being under siege etc. Annoying and almost impossible to sort out as he wouldn't take orders to get rid of them and I was about 30-60 minutes away real time.

Secondly (possible inflexibility), after getting frustrated, saving then quiting to do something else, I looked over the stats of what everyone had got up to. I was most shocked to see that the AI had not got very far to filling their first 1000 ship slots that this modified version gave you from the get go. In fact, I had out produced my nearest enemy by a multiple of 4 in terms of ships (and my strategy is never ship spamming early on either - rather - econ, econ and more econ).

So what were they doing with all their time? Not much by the looks of things. The AI could be fairly inflexibile at this current stage? Has anyone else had similar experiences/experiments before?