QuestGAV

Social spending also gets shut off if you have less than -500 BC in your treasury.

I've seen mostly beam weapons until the last few games where I've eschewed beams myself. I wonder if what we're seeing is a correlation of our own tendencies. Otherwise, I'd imagine each of us personally has only seen a pretty small sample size where variations like that are normal. If you put all of our experiences together they'd come out to what you'd expect from the "rand()%3" line of code.

If you target one of their units/planets with one of your units that can attack them it will declare war.