With the current ship AI, vector engines appear to be completely useless. This is mostly due to lack of momentum - turning is irrelevant when aggressive ships close to ramming distance and then instantly stop dead rather than 'jousting'.

On the other side, the AI is competent at kiting when the ...

The game with those techs was started early on, first or second patch probably. Took me a while to get to the end of that game. Settings were random tech paths, tech not visible and no tech trading.

New games with all tech visible don't show those techs, they also don't show super techs.

Some of these might be intentional, or have some invisible factor that balances them out, but they stick out as not making intuitive sense.

Advanced Missile Swarms:
Hunter Missile Battery (M) and Hunter Missile Battery (L) are both large size (88)

Self-Repairing Swarms:
Reinforcing Swarm (S) and ...

A bunch of destroyers with ion cannons and assault pods worked like a charm for me.

The biggest challenge is not having the fleet AI act like a moron and jump in one at a time and then slowly trail behind the hive ship at long range even though they are twice as fast and set to aggressive.

I can't attach the save, because it's 12MB zipped and max file size here is 10MB.

bad_races.png

I've attached a picture of all the recent colonies though, and you can see that it appears to be engaging in deliberate sabotage, dropping the Mortalens and Teekans to the bottom of the ocean and ...

In my current game I have a large empire with many races on established planets.

When on the create new colony list the tooltip shows a reasonable race for sending there, for example sending ackdarians to a water world. When you click the button and the automated colony ship is built though, it ...

The Mortalen are all about the invading, and keep pushing you to invade independent colonies, but this seems to be a terrible idea under almost all circumstances.

Having an unhappy and unproductive colony for invading is fine and perfectly reasonable.

Having other races dislike you for doing so is ...

A few suggestions on spies:

It desperately needs to default to the same or similar mission when the spy succeeds. If they just stole part of cruiser tech off the ackdarians, there is absolutely no reason to make you scroll through the list to find the ackdarians again and then choose steal research ...