Has anyone else seen this?
On Tough setting, 9 opponents, Gigantic galaxy...
My last couple games, despite not having much clue what I'm doing, I've noticed my economy was skyrocketing ahead of all the AI civs. It's also 150 turns into the game, and I'm the only one with any military rating whatsoever. Clicking through the graphs, I noticed that all AI civs had miniscule and flat Research curves. After increasing my espionage against them, I found that they were all spending only 1 BC on research.
I've had other games where they behaved normally, but the last two have been like this. They're colonizing other planets, so they're growing. They just aren't bothering to invest in any research.