Re: Some newbie questions
1) No idea; unknown technology could be either racial technology, or fields you haven't researched yet. I would advice against trading technologies with the AI, as you will probably be able to exploit the AI too easily.
2) You can attack as many times per turn as you have movement points. Planetary defences are usually not much of a threat, which puts the focus on ships for your own defence (or other means to prevent the enemy from getting to your worlds to begin with). There are mods that make planets more dangerous however.
3) Missiles are way too powerful in tactical combats indeed, since you are able to "dance" and avoid fire. They are less dangerous in strategical combat (where the computer plays battles in your stead), as you cannot exploit their longer range this way. Lastly, note that seekers are easily countered by Point Defence Cannons, which reduce their importance later on in the game.
4) You can get other peoples in your Empire by capturing a planet having these breathers or a ship transporting them. AIs do not put any value to ships having their population, and so you could easily buy them for virtually nothing. And I gather it doesn't give any value to the homeworld itself either.
Diplomacy is, as in any game I can think of at the moment, not really the strong aspect for the AI. If you would like to do a lot of diplomacy, I guess your best bet is to play a multiplayer game. The TDM mod might improve AI regarding diplomacy as well, but I cannot say for sure since I seldom play singleplayer. This mod makes no change to the game, save making the AI more intelligent.
Lastly, are you playing on the Hard difficulty? Any difficulty lower than this one will mean that the AI cannot use all its ministers, possibly crippling all AI Empires. The AI bonuses should be considered as being the actual difficulty levels, since they allow the AI to cheat by having a lot more resources than you do.
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