i was just guessing at my post anyhow in so far as ive never played a game long enough on the hardest level to actualy do any 'testing' ......... yet. im still learning all the ins and outs so that when i do move too the top i dont just get slaughtered.

and what i have learned beyond any doubt is that i can build a core empire of say 6 or 7 worlds and dont need to develope any more worlds further to meet my research and production goals. my general strat once i switch from develope mode to war mode is to just build lots of stock exchanges on my conqured worlds. in the words of my hero ronco i 'set it and forget it' , and i usualy end up with just huge ammounts of cash to piddle away, the last 10 or so games on normal mid size maps with lots of planets and stars , ive not yet ended one game with less than a million BCs. along with having researched every tech worth having and most of the others to boot and having literaly hundereds of ships. in short ive maxed my empire out enough to crush thge AI with only 6 or 7 worlds. everything after that point is just filler stuff,

the hardest thing you can think of is to get an AI to actualy think like a human. but by giving the AI huge bonus to all their production values thats a short cut to getting them to that same 'caped out' point that human players allways reach. now i dont choose to put embasys on my extra worlds, but it IS a valid tactic, just not one that i choose, i build stock exchanges instead, but depite the difference in choice of what to build after we have 'caped out' the fact that we HAVE 'caped out' still remains.

i guess all i can say is that it isnt a tactic i would choose but its a valid one. its not like the AI is stocking planets with just farms and nothing else. or building 3 moral buildings on a PQ 4 planet.

and another thing to think of, if the AI built as a human would AND got these huge bonusus to boot, you would never be able to beat it. no matter how good you were the AI would allways be better. if you took the top 5 people off the rankings, and let them play a MP game and gave one the huge advantages the AI get than id be very very shocked if that one with the advantages didnt win and win big every single game. its akin to two chess masters playing a game where one of them starts with no pawns and the other starts with an extra queen,

you couldnt beat a compitent human player with the same advantages that the AI gets. i say count your blessings, if by some fluke the AI could actualy be built to mimic a human player youd be in here harumping about what the point is to an AI thats so hard you cant beat it. after all what fun is a game that you start out knowing you cant win?

In general, the AI has tremendous problems managing planets. Patch 1.2 material.

ok...so i've tried to see the "AI has so much production is doesn't have to properly develop it's planets" angle

I think this is not the major reason. After playing some more and paying attention, it does this a lot on tough too, where there are no bonuses.

ok...so i've tried to see the "AI has so much production is doesn't have to properly develop it's planets" angle...so I played a bit more of my 'gifted' game to the point where i was the dominant civ in the galaxy on all fronts

You have to be careful here though, because you are the dominant empire, it means your influence is pretty overwhelming too, you can even make some sort of a case, that even planets not directly in danger of flipping might have some reason to build up influence.

I have noticed this before, however a lot of this is due to researching technology that increases your influence. I have NEVER noticed the AI research any of these technologies beyond the first tech (some ambitious AI have been building cultural exchange centers when I conquered them). In my opinion, the AI needs to place more emphasis on these technologies rather than filling planets with embassies that aren't even placed on the influence bonus tiles.

That's true, but by dominating, i mean in almost every area, including research. Besides a dominating empires owning a large piece of the real estate are bad enough, add super quicker breeders and 30 billion+ populations (a very popular style of play I suspect), most dominant human player empires are naturally very influencial even without influence tech.

They only time I ran into excessive use of embassys was on a minor race world that had been under the shadow of my empire for years. I didn't bother to invade it because of a large population and high approval, so Info warfare tactics would have been useless, and I didn't want to damage the lvl 15 planet. Eventually it ran out of food and the approval dropped to under 50%, so when I invaded I found atleast 6 embassys, maybe seven.

The problem here is that minor races can't be flipped, regardless of influence level (according to posts here and also my own limited experience), and yet the minor races still build the embassies and influence bases like they might get flipped.

I use mini-soldiers; they give you some advantage and destroy almost no buildings. Granted I lose more soldiers, but I always try to have as high a soldiering rating as possible. Since so few building are destroyed, the time it takes to build the planets to my liking is very short.