I wanted to slow down the colony rush at the begining, so I edited the Colony Module to be 500 cost instead of 50 (playing TA). Enabled cheats so I could look at the whole map to see how fast the AI would produce colony ships. It didn't seem to make any difference. So I set the cost to 5,000. No difference there either. So I then set the price to 500,000. I figured there's no way the AI could make that much BC in a few turns at the begining. There was still no difference in how fast the AI produced ships.

With the cost set at 500,000 for a Colony Module, the costs came out to:
Raw build cost for default Colony Ship: 500,091 BC
Raw build cost for Cargo hull with just Colony Module: 500,055 BC (AI redesigns ships to be this one)

Purchase Price for C-hull/C-Module ship: 11,144,172 BC
2nd price: 7,429,448 BC + 371,473 BC for 6,668 weeks
3rd price: 3,714,774 BC + 4,090 for 5,791 weeks
4th price: 1,857,412 BC + 2,805 BC for 155,430 weeks

I checked on one of the AIs with 6 colonies (ctrl+shift+z) and saw that it had a positive bank balance, positive income, 2-3 factories on each colony and some factories /markets on the capital. Setting the AI's tax to 100%, prodction and espionage to 0%, I get 208 BC a week income. So with the price set that high, how can the AI produce 5 colony ships within the first 10 turns?