Current Game Version: 1.2

Ok, I've finished my first game.. or two if you count the first campaign mission. I don't.

Now then, a few questions.

1) Learning AI.
As a GalCivI "veteran" (In the sense that I owned and played the game) I seem to recall something about a learning AI, but I dread delving into archives for fear of only digging up hearsay. First of all assuming it exists, in what form does it take? Does each player's copy individually learn to defeat the player's strategy (i.e., "He's used Beams and Armor for the past 20 games in a row, so it's probably a safe bet to ream him with Missiles and Shields.") Or does this only apply to Metaverse games where the dev team will study player's strategies or some such and then apply what they've learned to future AI coding?

2) Fool AI and Difficulty in General
All I have to go on at the moment is in the PDF manual (Or if it's in the regular manual too I just missed it.) But what part of the Fool AI causes it to basically sit there drooling, even if handed stuff? Ok, to be fair when I got a random event towards the end of the game that handed the Torians at least a hundred ships everywhere they did very slowly move them toward my starbases to attack. But before that when the Yor found a Ranger class their acts were to first declare war on the Arceans, then hide their ship in their homeworld. The Arceans then begged me for help, saying that they were almost done for (Despite the Yor not having the technology to build any transports) and so I gave them at the time my best ship. I got out the popcorn for nothing though because they too just hid the ship on their homeworld. Oi. They also seem to have a terminal problem with research and production. Is it really impossible for them to finish building anything because their economy is at 10%? Because that's what my espionage showed. Building times of "Never." But given that I get the same estimate before I have anything building I suppose that could be a bug. I mean they do have more than one or two buildings on their planets, so they had to have been able to finish something. I also noticed that even giving them the abilities required to trade and build freighters didn't do much for them. According to the Trade screen, they're all sitting on hefty heftyheftyamounts of cash despite that -90% economy penalty, so why is it only one of the races ever managed to build any freighters? (Out of 5 AI opponents.) They didn't seem to get much pep from when I purposefully voted to redistribute 7% of my income to them all either. I've read in the patch notes that the AI has a random chance to do something stupid on purpose; does that apply for an entire game? And is it more pronounced the lower you go, or is it a flat rate for the bottom 3 difficulty levels? I mean they could have bought those freighters.. I guess I should have subsidized the production of freighters for the other 5 races and just gave them away.

Ah well, at least I and can play for real now that I have a better grasp of the game's mechanics under my belt after the experience .. the very very, uneventful experience.

3) Whatever happened to my the Terror Stars?
A cursory look around the forums seems to indicate that Terror Stars and generally the ability to go "PYOOM" to planets or stars is no more. Is this true, and if so why? (Tangent: One thing I loved about MooII was how you could blow up a planet but then turn the asteroid field it became right back into a fresh new planet again. Great strategy for a Xenophobic race there, add this to the wishlist..)

4) New Game Vs. Metaverse
If you're not planning on using any mods or cheats, is there any reason not to use the Metaverse button for a new game?

Other:
W) (Um, someone probably mentioned this but uh, is there going to be an update on the actual logistics point costs? Descriptions and such for example say Huge ships use 6, when they use 8, and Large ships use 6 instead of 5, and so on..)
X) View
Finally, what is really the default defaultview? I know the game originally starts at an isometric view but hitting the "1" key sets it to.. top-down. As best I can tell "2" is the only one that resets the view correctly.