It seems to me that the AI's got to the point were they can be pretty smart about knowing how other races are faring, what systems are defended or not, what their fleets are doing, etc.

Then my idea is, why not allow the player to share information with them (and even betwen ai's) ?

I dont mean anything like shared vision of the starmap - after all the ai might not want you to know where it's own fleet is - but to make it so that the ai would contact you and give you some information about a specific race every 4 or 5 turns with an option in the diplomatic screen.

so in turn 100 you make a deal with the korx, that they will sell you information about the Torians for 30 turns, and in exchange, you will pay x credits per turn to the Korx. They could even offer to do this if they notice you are ostile to a race they also hate.

So every few turns the korx ambassador contacts u and says something like

-psst!! psst!! yes, you there! The Torians have sent their fleet to raid x minor race and x world is undefended!-
-Torians are mining x resource that they found on location x!-
-New torian ship designs use mostly x and x weapon and x and x defenses-
-Torian diplomacy and economy are both the suxxzorts compared to yours. They will sell you their grandmother for some colored mirrors -
-Torian military bonus is half your own bonus. Your troops would pound theirs any day of the week!-
-The torian are sending their fleet and transports trough our space at position x wich is just adyacent to your space, as if they wanted to evade your scaners. Just tought you should know.-