[Captain Kwok]

I did place the RDs first but for some reason the AI wouldn't get to building a spaceport for a much longer time and lots of resources would be lost when other planets were colonized - although this is not what should have happened. I did note at the time though there was some resource issues and dropped construction so I'll have to do more testing to identify the cause. But I agree that is the most "human" behaviour to build the RD first.

It's not really possible to have the AI to use the "hop" method of colonizing to claim as much space as possible because you can't explicity tell it to build a colony ship at the frontier colony etc.