I started a game the other day with the AI set to crippling difficulty. In the past, I have had trouble with the AI acting foolishly on higher difficulties and it has now become a habit for me to check and make sure they are set on the intelligence level I sepcified.
As soon as gameplay started, I checked all of the AI players and each of them were on Genius (I think) and for the first several turns everything was working out great. However, after maybe something around 50 turns or so, I notcied the AI doing stupid things with ships and research, so I checked each of the AI levels again making sure nothing went crazy. To my surprise, all the difficulties went back down to Normal!
I wish i had the saved game or a debug file to show you all but as soon as I saw it I started another game and saved over it...
Has anyone else experienced something similiar to this? This was the first time the AI switched like that on me.