I've played a few random games in TA so far, and from what I've seen, the AI is pretty screwed up when it comes to research and ship building. Much more so than in DA. Races will often randomly either not build ships weapons (or not research it), or never build transports.

Big, far reaching races with good tech and ecconomic ratings will never build combat ships, and keep a military ranking of zero. Often they'll have war decared on them, build dozens of transports, and just fly them around because they can't find any unprotected worlds to attack. THis isn't just an initial AI bug, they keep doing after YEARS have passed.

Other races will sometimes build huge combat fleets, go on the war path and declare war on half their neighbours, camp their planets and destroy any ship built, but never build a single transport, so the war deadlocks permenantly this way...for years without any resolution.

The last game I played was on a difficulty of Painful (Gifted Intelligence), and the same thing happened. This isn't a "random personality trait", this is a bug pure and simple. It's not challenging to play against such stupid AI and the DA AI was frankly a lot better than this.