I have noticed an odd bug that has happened a couple times now. Soon after starting the game and playing a number of turns, I notice that the other empires are not colonizing, are doing negligiable amounts of research, and are building almost no ships (and no warships). The second time it happened, I kept playing to see how long it would last, and I successfully conquered the entire (large) galaxy without any of the other empires building even one warship. This particular game was on "tough" difficulty level. The most planets any one empire had colonized was three, and none of them had any research that I did not already have. After finishing everyone off without encountering even the smallest bit of military resistance, I started a new game and the same effect seemed to be happening. So I exited out of the game completely, and re-initialized it. This seemed to fix the problem and all the empires acted as they normally would in the new game I started, expanding, researching, building a military fleet, etc.

Mike Beyna