I've been playing Altarian on challenging and the AI seems like its locked in a box. All three empires that are attacking me just deploy mass driver type weapons and I've traded and researched for some killer armor protection. I'm cutting through them with Plasma and Harpoons and they are very slow to come up with a shield defense or ECM. They are ganging up on me because they think I'm too aggressive but they are bleeding more then me because of their dumb ship building strategy. Does the AI improve on higher levels and make more intelligent choices?