My main annoyances are playing against PP races and trying to stop the AI from re-colonizing EVERYTHING (they all seem to have massively huge hab settings for some reason).

PP races : I startup a colony, and before i can build defences or a mass driver equipped orbital fort, the colony is destroyed within 3 turns by the AI spamming packets at it that instantly destroy it and bypass my fleet (incredibly dumb IMHO). I know you can "steal" packets with freighters, but it is incredibly micro intensive and the AI usually spams too mayn packets for me to get them all. How exactly are you supposed to counter this?
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I tried going after their starbases but the AI simply doesnt care and keeps re-building them.

I finally resorted to sticking 5 cruisers on every world i can to stop the AI from re-colonizing them, but the AI is somehow managing to re-colonize those worlds even with my fleet in orbit! How is it doing that? Ive tried setting up a massive standard/speed trap minefield but the AI is still somehow re-colonizing those worlds with 100k+ pop while my fleet is sitting in orbit.

And pretty much every war ive fought has been the AI ignoring whatever i do and just spamming colonies. On most occasions it wont bother to put up a fight and will simply try to out-bore me by colonizing everything. Is this typical?

Im also having trouble with mine fields, for example lets say i have a fleet with a sweep ability of 30k mines per year or something really high. I enter a small minefield at warp 9. Since my sweep aiblity is really high, I should be able to sweep all the mines out of my path and not have to worry about the mines right? Nope, somehow i still hit the mines instead...this doesnt make any sense, my ships are sweeping the area as they advance, and they have a much higher sweep ability than the enemy's mine laying ability, so how are they hitting the mines?

I cant figure out how the patrol order works either. For example lets say i h