Looking at people who post on the boards or submit scores to metaverse is clearly selecting for the more experienced strategy gamers. I guarantee you that among the general game-buying population the numbers are nowhere near as high as metaverse indicates.
I think what the original poster was talking about was that all the AI players research the same weapon tech, rather than different ones. I have seen this as well. I think it might be related to tech trading, but I'm not sure.
I've hit this problem before, but it is pretty easy to work around. When you see two of your scout ships together, just manually send one in a different direction. You don't even have to take it off auto-explore. As soon as it gets to where you sent it, it will resume exploring. If you send it somewhere near unexplored territory it will go there. It seems basically like auto-explore sends the ships towards the nearest unexplored area. I
