[Q]

Two important questions and I have only partial answers.
For the colonization the value of the planet seems very imporatant for the AI. It is frequent that near large planets even with breatheble atmosphere are ignored if they have a low resource value and tiny planets with a high value are colonized two or more systems away. Which is IMO not very reasonable and should be changed. But this is hardcoded and you can't modify it yourself.
The number of fleets is another problem. If you give the AI many fleets, you may have insufficient numbers in each fleet to be effective. And in contrast to your experience I saw the AI use multiple fleets in the same system, where it would have been much more effective to combine them in one large fleet. In my experience the AI is completely lost if there are several systems with combats. The AI will choose one or two systems and send all his fleets/ships to this conflict and ignore all other location. So if the AI is at war with multiple empires on multiple locations he has a severe problem even if he is very strong and would have enough ships for defense and counter atttack. Again there is nothing you can modify yourself because this is hardcoded. Therefore I use rather small numbers of fleets for the AI and I am not sure if the Rage would have done better with a larger number of fleets.

[This message has been edited by Q (edited 06 October 2001).]