Large Galaxy Size, 4 Challenging Random Opponents, tech-trading disabled:

My last two games of TA (after not noticing anything particularly out of the ordinary as far as the AI is concerned), I noticed a few strange things:

1) Terran AI did not research any weapons technology, however, even though they did not show on the military graph, in the Foreign Relations display they were listed as "Strongest Military". The AI did not attack them, including a Drengin AI who had been particularly aggressive well into the second year of the game. When I attacked them, I discovered the skies above their planets were "guarded" by Space Miners. 2-3 per planet, and occassionally a "terran defender" unit with 0 attack and 4 defense (armor).

2) The Thalan laundry list is long and mind-boggling.

The Thalan homeworld, when played by the AI, produces ridiculously powerful influence in a massive radius. None of their starting galactic wonders produces any influence, and this is basically from the very early colonization stages of the game. This may be because every square other than their galactic achievement buildings, capital, and starport are Embassies, based on the next observation.

The Thalan AI doesnt seem to bother researching any of their building techs. They seem to research weapons and propulsion techs, and hit extremely powerful versions of these very, very early. Mid-game, once the colonization period has been over for about a year and wars are erupting, it is not uncommon to see them with the higher-end plasma weapons and warp drives. How they research these deep techs is beyond my comprehension, as they are only generating research points from their homeworld. After building up enough espionage on them to examine their worlds, I found that they had only built Embassys.

Despite the fact that the Thalans seem to have no other buildings than their Galactic Achievements, they are still able to research at a remarkable pace, and support a sizeable military, not to mention they invariably out-expand every other AI, and are generally holding at least 25 worlds with nothing but a few embassies on each. These worlds would be, for a human player, bigtime money losers. Especially considering the next point:

Most of the Thalan worlds have some bizarrely small amount of population on them even late into the game, say 145 million or some odd number like that. With those kind of populations, I have to assume the AI is running taxes so high that the approval of their non-homeworlds preclude any kind of population growth at all. Nonetheless, this does not prevent them from researching exclusively weapons/propulsion tech and building ships from these worlds that have nothing but a starport and a couple embassies.

The combination of a large number of planets, tiny populations, no buildings other than embassies, and strange research patterns leaves me to believe that the AI may not be playing entirely fairly with the Thalans, seeing as I have tried to replicate any kind of strategy that would allow me to have 25 worlds with nothing on them, research only weapons tech, and try to build ships. I have, needless to say, failed in this attempt.

Lastly, a few suggestions for the Thalans:

Have them begin the game with their Manufacturing and Research Buildings. They are prohibitively expensive to maintain at their initial levels, but it shouldnt take 80 turns of research to be able to construct a building on your planets. Also, I don't see why they don't have some poor-man's version of a farm, or why they can't research the trade-line more quickly. There's nothing particularly fun about not being able to build a single building for 50+ turns. I realize tech-trading would alleviate this problem, but I greatly prefer playing with that option disabled, which may account for this.

The highest level of the Thalan buildings are pitiful. The Drengin max-level Slave labs cost 8 maintenence and produce 12 research, which is the same amount as the max-level Thalan research buildings, and 2 less maintanence. This makes no sense at all. Instead, I'd recommend the 3 tiers change a bit, they really need to create at least 14-15 to justify the expense.