I'm not sure if it's a bug of some kind of feature of which i'm not aware of.

I bought the game past week (got bored of waiting for store retail in Spain... lazy Friendware) and i'm still with my first games. Yesterday i decided to try the Metaverse and created a game in a large galaxy, with five opponents set in Normal (manually), all the default options and me playing a custom civilization.

During all the first part of the game i ignored all the weapon and defense branches. Although i got Stinger II from the Akirians and made my army with basic Tigran Stingers ships (with Missile 1 attack and nothing more added in components), in the end the Torians and Arceans developed a bigger army. So i used all my research power to research missile technology up to the tech previous to Harpoon and then changed to research missile defense (to counter Arcean). And here comes my surprise that when i end researching the Missile Defense Theory, i got several messages of techs researched, all of them of the same branch: Chaff, ECM, ECM II, ECM III....   I'm not against free stuff when it's for me but i don't understand how i could get such a boost.

Later in the game it happened again when i was investigating all the stuff for planetary invasion. It was Space Marines or one like that, that when i researched it and i also got the next one to it.   

Out of topic, i have read a lot in these forums about the AI not doing a good planet development. Until now i haven't played higher than Normal but yesterday i payed attention to the planets i conquered (culturally or military) and i found strange how the Torians and Arceans seem to like to build Spaceports first... And also build Technological and Research Capitals in the same planet.  Also, the Arceans had an impressive army... of transports!!!   They had like dozens and dozens of transports (with 1 defense point in each category) and some (a few) defenders and heavy fighters. I suppose they wanted to increase their military rating in a cheap way.