Survey ship was cruising through picking up resources - was not parked.

Terran survey ship was off on the other side - don't know about their scouts. It was still pretty early in the game - everyone only had about 3 planets at the time. Scout ships could do it for them but with uncommon habital planets they would need about a 800% luck factor.

The AI will purposely go to the outer edges of their range at times. I also have witnessed them using a leapfrog technique on me, or at least it seemed to be. They colonized a planet. Two turns later a colonizer is seen leaving that system(I didn't actually catch it leaving the planet)with only 24M on board.

I think the story is explained in Galciv1. These older races apparantly know where all the planets are.

The AIs (except for the Terrans) have and use Stallar Cartography tech, but unlike GC1 that doesn't mean they know where all the 'good' planets are--they just know there are planets there of some kind.

Under normal circumstances the AI is required to scout before sending colony ships, but on levels above Intelligent it has a chance to 'guess' whether a planet is good or not. I *think* it may also be able to scout with its colony ships, rather than sending actual 'scout' class ships, too, you'd have to confrim that with Frogboy though.

I have noticed this too, at least on Painful level: the colony ships go directly to a habitable planet, even if I have observed none of their other ships coming within scouting distance. It certainly seems like the AI players know exactly where the good planets are right from the start.

On the rush building, in a recent game I saw the Drengin colonise a world, then a colony ship left the new colony a turn or so later. I did not think to check how many people were on the ship.

A comment or two on using or not using scout ships ---

The AI seems to like using a lot of them.

If you set up your games using abundant planets and abundant habitable planets there is less need to use scouts (or even stellar cartography) - most every star you go to is likely to have a good planet to settle on. I like to use uncommon habitable planets to make the game more interesting for me - and that's why I hate to see the AI go right to the plum planets.

Instead of (or in addition to) using the scouts to find planets, I like to load my scouts (use cargo hulls - forget the core ship scouts) with sensors. That way they sweep a wide path which really helps to find resources (economy, military, etc). Resources are usually tucked in out of the way places and if your scouts just go from star to star and have a limited sensor range they will not see them. Being the first one to find and settle on these resources can really turn the game around.

To answer Frogboy --- yes, I always use the high CPU feature. I greatly prefer to see clever AI rather than just cranking up the difficulty level which only gives me a bunch of moronic thugs with a barrel of cash.