To be honest, I am not entirely too sure as to what the AI consisted of for this game. It looks like they had some basic strings to work with and used the overspent races to make up for the lack of MicroManagement-enabled AI. Then proceeded to "COLONIZE ALL THE THINGS!"

As for ship design, I think the HE had the most interesting ones, but as of yet never really ran into any significant problems. Even if one of the AI's got a little ahead of me, dropping on their poorly maintained planets was enough to grab a few tech and push ahead.

Would be very curious to see how a more robust AI would handle a game like this?