I've not played a whole lot as my local retailers had issues getting the game in stock and I only got my hands on it two days ago. Since then RL has interfered as well, thus I've only played a grand total of three times, for maybe a few hours each time. I've only been playing the campaign on normal difficulty and have restarted the first mission once so far. The first time I didn't build any colony ships so I only had the first one I started with and colonized the planet in the same sector as myself. The bad guys took the two planets in the middle sector after a while and I realized I would most likely have to be more aggressive on building colony ships and taking those planets, so I restarted the mission.

This time, turn 1, I started making a second colony ship and sent my scout to check out the area around the planets in the middle sector. My first colony ship completed and I set him to go to the class 10 planet in the middle. Imagine my surprise when 1 turn later I noticed the class 8 planet in the middle sector had been taken by my ally. Last game it had taken the bad guys many turns to get their hands on these planets, and my ally had shown no inclination to settle them. This game, 17 or 18 turns into the game, my ally was colonizing already! Oh well, I figured I'd share the sector with him. Two turns later, as my colony ship entered that sector, the class 10 planet was also taken by my ally! Does the computer AI tend to 'copy' my actions when it is allied with me?

The reason I'm curious about this is that my allies showed absolutely *NO* initiative in colonizing other planets outside of their sector the first time through the mission, I had nearly completed using all my tiles on the class 8 planet in my sector (with only having bought one or two) before the bad guys took the middle sector's planets. The second time around, I was very aggressive, the only way I could have pumped out the colony ships faster would have been if I paid for them on turn 1 and started sending them then, and my ally beat me to both planets this time around.

I know the reason isn't that my ally didn't know about the planets, he and I both had scout ships discover those sectors about the same time. Those scout ships had moved on to checking out the bad guys territory and were just piddling around in empty space looking for resources/anomolies when the bad guys finally took the middle sector. That, and he had stellar cartography, I paid him for it near the start of the game, so that should have told him there were planets there to check out at the very least.