[Captain Kwok]

Most of those changes have been made in v0.92 that I've been working on. Resupply Depots are now the second facility after Spaceports to be built in a new system. Although this doesn't appear as the only hiccup for expansion, but it does seem to help somewhat. Another area of code calls for the reduction of explorer ships when new races are encountered - which might be a second hiccup. The AI in v0.92 is also launching fighters into space (believe it or not, there is no code for this function in stock) and satellites as well. If the AI does decide to build troop transports it will add them to fleets and if it makes sat layers it will place sats at WPs that lead to unknown or enemy systems.

Re: Research, I know the paths are not optimized but there is also some randomness involved - the AI will be big on research if it just happens to a colonize a big breathable planet that is resource poor and already has less than 10% of its total colonies as research colonies.

In SE:IV it was easy to specify numbers and types of ships that AI should have for the number of colonies it had etc. Now it's a lot less obvious with "priority" values attached to a design type and other factors that are not exactly clear.