I assume this is a bug and not just really, really bad ai. I played the first mission of the campaign on painful, but it was really easy because the drengin did not make any ships with actual weapons on them. They just put stacks of 'defenders' with no armor or weapons on all their planets and waited for me to come massacre them. Didn't attack or send anything out but constructors. Then when I conquered one of their planets, I stole Plasma Weapons (!!!) technology from them. Gee guys, that might have come in handy. If they'd used it at all I would have gotten crushed. And that's when I quit and came on here. Maybe I've had a few unlucky games, but I don't feel like I"m playing the same game all the reviews glowed about. But it seems like this company is fairly responsive and they don't use starforce so hopefully that will change.