I've read through the various threads regarding the AI being completely incapable of constructing anything at all (sending its lone scout around but nothing more) and how a brisk reinstall fixes the problem. It is thus that I present you with the following, odd scenario.

The AI seems to have lost its purpose in life.

No matter the difficulty, the map settings, or the level of ships I throw at it, the AI refuses to construct anything larger than tier 1 ships and technology, and always in limited quantity. It's terribly sad to watch a lone enemy construction ship fly out into the middle of nowhere and just sit there motionless, as if the entire crew had this grand idea to construct a new battlestation and suddenly just went off to listen to Linkin Park and wear tight pants.

Sure, they still send the occasional fleet of destroyers and other such useless ships after you, but as soon as you get that one defense station up and running, it's no contest anymore. Also, constructing anything larger than an Akira or comparable offensive unit means that you are now the most powerful player in the whole map. Forever.

Is anybody else running into this anomaly?

I gave the game a shot using all the basic settings, and it's still delivering the same results, even after two subsequent reinstalls. The AI always builds approximately two or three defense stations, two tier 1 shipyards, an assorted fleet of frigates and destroyers, and about four or five construction ships that then sit around looking stupid. The computer mines correctly if resources are set to normal or double, and simply ignores the use of mining ships if resources are set to unlimited, as it should. From what I can tell, the AI is functioning up to a certain point exactly as it should, but then hits a wall and cannot progress any further.

As a test, I set a massive fleet to green alert, toasted specific enemy vessels until I had destroyed exactly ten, and sure enough, the AI replaced them with ten new tier 1 attack vessels. Out of curiosity, I took out their shipyards and their construction craft. The starbase churned out another four, which in turn built two new shipyards before sitting stationary.

An item possibly of interest: I DID succeed in making a Medium AI Romulan produce a single D'deridex after sequentially wiping out his entire microcosm fleet several times in a row, without destroying any stations in the process. However, upon defeating the behemoth, the AI resorted again to small ships, up to the bitter end of the round. After destroying their Warbird Yard, they made no efforts to rebuild it.

I am running the game from an external hard drive, but I have complete administrator access to the entirety of the system. Could this remote-access method be causing a problem with the way the AI protocols interact with the core OS and whatever mathematics it calls upon? I don't exactly have enough space on my primary HD to move everything over to it to test, so if anybody can simply give me a, "yup, that's your problem" with any confidence I may justify swapping a few files and programs from one drive to the other in order to make space for Fleet Ops on the primary drive.

In short, no new findings; the AI is functional, but passive. Hard to provoke it to attack with any force larger than a handful-sized fleet.

I have the same problem.with the "Fog of War" off or on.I some times like to ( when playing as the Romulans )  to shut  down   all the other ships    and using  nothing but Tavara's supply my resourse needs. Fereration  shet everything down and use Sabers and Ventures only. I feel the computer AI is acting perfectlly normal, It can't think in a manner that is not Logical. like some humans can. Not yet

One of the big problems with AI is that it has a limited area of construction arround the starbase. I played a little with the AI files and made the computer build a moq'bara station before the imperial yard. After building the station he couldn't find space arround to build the damn imperial yard ( although a little further from the starbase there was alot of build space ). When i destroyed the moq'bara, he imediatly started to build the next step in his construction list - the imperial yard, in the same space the moq'bara used to be. I searched in all the files, but i couldn't find a line that describes the build space arround the starting point. But i think this is the AI's biggest problem - limited pathfinding when it comes to construction. As for the number of ships ... just edit the AI files and edit the number of ships the computer should build. Again he only builds limited tech ships because he cannot find space to build advanced structures.