I don't really play this for a crunchy game, honestly. Might be why I've been so okay with the mechanics mutating wildly. The space-ethics keep me and a friend of mine invested. Much like Alpha Centauri, which we also love heh.
Something the AI did impressed me - it eventually took my defensive border starbase, so I built up a fleet to defend the next system of my strung-out, spidery-realm. But they didn't attack there - they snuck through a nebula of unclaimed systems, struck right next to Sol. By the time my fleet caught up, they had overwhelmed the Sol Starbase, and had troop ships in-system about to invade Earth!
They... hmm, they bombed Earth and my biotrophies significantly. Rolan7 will remember that
It's still interesting. They never claimed Sol, it would have been extremely expensive earlygame and so far from the border. But they snuck through the nebula and unclaimed systems to strike my homeworld. Threw me.
I barely managed to recapture my border colony's starbase before hitting war exhaustion (equivalent tech, and yet their starbase is ~950, mine was 650? hrmph). Did it though, and accepted their pending white peace. When they'd sent it, they would have gained the system - but as I controlled the star base, they had incomplete control and so there was no border change at all.
Dicks.