Hi, I am a first time poster (no flaming me please).

I started a game vs the AI, huge galaxy, abundant on all and tight clusters. 9 Enemy races all on easiest, and I was "Team" with the altarians, while I was using a custom race. So, im sitting there, in the start, spamming out colony ships to grap as much land as possible. I had access to like, 5-6 stars and 9 colonies to be constructed, all good. Wanted more +10 class planets, only got one of those.

Fast forward like, 2 years. I've had some contact with the other races, mostly because I ran into their flagships. Research is going at a medium pace, and seeing on the map as how nobody has started to claim the HUGE cluster (like a 20% of the map, and prolly 40% of the stars on the map) I once again start spamming out colonizers (which was easy since I had claimed an economy resource). Fast forward 3-4 years. Im sitting there, with a turdload of colonies, research is like, 1-3 turns for most of the things, even advanced stuff, and I think it was that tech after the last research tech that gives a research building, cant remember its name, it was only 9 turns to research, so all was good there. This is the point where I was beginning to get annoyed. I was playing on easiest, but the enemy hadn't built one single ship yet.

In fact, 2/3rds of the races hadn't even bothered to build anything. They had planned it out on the map, but not spent anything on social production. I know they had money, the arceans had like, 15k+ from trade routes with me.

They just didn't spend 1 single dime. They just used the starting colony ship and flagship, and thats it.

Bug, or just an effect of playing on easiest?