Playing on the challenging difficulty, I had 2 races left to defeat. The altarians had 3 planets left and I was at peace with them so I tried to sneak in a few fleets and transports to each of their planets so I could take them out suprisingly in one turn and then! (the point of this post which is one of the little gems of this game): the Altarian ambassador comes up on my screen with a lengthy speech about how he knows what I'm doing but unfortunately for him the difficulty is only "challenging", not "intelligent" or above. He also said that he just wanted me to be aware that he was aware of my overused tactic and that he wasn't really AI, he was actually a sentient being. It totally suprised me and I laughed my ass off. I love the people who made this game.