Left game running for an hour, please explain AI behavior

I'm new to Sins and I'm trying to figure out what caused some odd behavior from the AI.

I was playing a 8 player free for all on a 3 galaxy map against 6 hard and 1 unfair. I began with aggressive colonization, #1 colonization #7/8 everything else for a while. After I had 1/3 of my galaxy, I was #1 in everything and worried that the game would be anticlimactic. But in the time it took me to reach 1/2 of my galaxy (finishing off a weak hard), I was #2 in everything. Not only had the unfair expanded faster than me, he controlled nearly all of the other two galaxies! I was worried at that point, and decided to send my entire fleet to conquer as much of the remaining hard in my galaxy as possible while fortifying the star and two wormholes that the unfair could invade through.

I had to leave as soon as the hard sent a level 5 Ankylon to my fleet, but forgot to press pause, and discovered my mistake one hour later. I immediately noticed three things:

1. My fleet was essentially in tact. The Ankylon seemed to have never died, because it was still level 5.
2. The hard in my galaxy had destroyed one of my plantets, but couldn't colonize it due to my culture. It had destroyed one of my wormhole starbases that was interrupting trade. I had one completely undefended planet next to it which was not conquered.
3. The unfair had done absolutely nothing.

I found this very discouraging, and I was hoping to hear from the community here what caused this behavior, and whether it would be at all interesting to finish this game. How did the unfair go from ~.25 galaxies to 1.5 galaxies in the time it took me to take over five planets? Why didn't it invade me when it had two galaxies? How challenging will it be to fight my way into his galaxies? Why didn't the normal attack my nearly defenseless planets? How on earth did the Ankylon survive for so long?

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Short answer: the AI is kind of dumb. The higher difficulties essentially just get resource cheats- which is why in general AI is at it's strongest early game when the player doesn't have a mature economy yet.

In general due to it's poor tactical choices and lack of ability to predict the player or apply effective counterplay once you get into the stage of the game where the major bottleneck is fleet supply rather then resource cost the AI has basically lost. Honestly if you want an opponent with more depth and intelligence you're going to need to find another player to square off against.

Don't get me wrong, playing against AI can be hard if you pit yourself against enough high difficulty AI- but it mostly comes down to defending against superior numbers early game and exploiting the deficiencies of the AI. However if you want to have to contend with an adaptable opponent with superior tactics another human player is the only way to go.

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In addition to the level of difficulty, AI behavior is strongly influenced by what strategic emphasis it draws in the pre-game "lottery" (unless you assign them yourself). The gold question mark in a box next to the level of difficulty is where you make that choice, otherwise it is assigned randomly. Sounds like you got a fortifier, researcher, or economist there, as those player types are much less aggressive. The other remaining type is aggressor, by the way.

Regarding the second part of your comment, the invasion of another star system can be quite challenging, and not at all anti-climactic. How to do it best will depend on the type of opponent you face.

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