[Suicide Junkie]

First off:
I believe the default "AI difficulty" setting is medium.
You will want to set this to High.
When on medium or low, the AI just turns off some of it's minister functions, high uses them all.
This setting does not induce any cheating on the part of the AI

Next, the AI bonus.
This is a multiplier for all the AI resources, and is "cheating" for the AI.
It goes something like:
None: 1x multiplier
Low: 2x
Medium 3x
High 5x
Most players set this to Medium for challenge once they've got the hang of the game.

The questions.
1) Yes. Missiles give no experience bonus to the firing ship. Using Point defense to shoot down missiles, and using direct-fire guns to finish off an ememy ship do get you experience.

2) Fleet experience adds with ship experience.
Fleet experience is completely separate from ship experience.
If you have an Elite "Alpha Squadron" fleet, and a newly formed "Newbie Fleet", and you swap all of the ships, you will end up with Elite ships in a newbie fleet, and newbie ships in an Elite fleet.

3) The move command tells the ship to go to a particular place. The Attack command tells the ship to seek after a target, which is very useful for simultaneous movement games.

4) The organic manipulation race trait provides facilities which can boost growth.
- "Optimal" is by definition the best.
- Climate control facilities are notoriously slow, but you can use more than one at a time on a planet.
- You can ferry people of two different races no problem. Watch out for the atmosphere they breath, though. If either race can't breathe the atmosphere, the whole planet will be domed, and you'll be reduced to 20% of your standard facility and cargo spaces.

5) You found a "neutral" race. You probably need to have over 10-50x its score before it will surrender. Many races have also been modded to never surrender, especially the TDM races.
Most players do not use neutrals in their games, because of the fact that they limit themselves to one system, and are basically pushovers with free technologies to capture.

[ 15 April 2002: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]