I had a mega-event that increased all planets quality up 20 levels. This resulted in some highly humorous behavior from the AI, as we all were pretty much set and just warning now for an influence, domination, or alliance victory, when suddenly all worlds now have 20 more tiles to build on, and all the 'uninhabitable worlds' (which there were literally hundreds of, as I was playing the largest map with 'few' habitable worlds selected).
The AI just stopped fighting and bum-rushed colonies, sending them out en mass, to try and gobble up these worlds. I ended up going from making +400 / turn down to negative because building up my worlds faster than pouplation built up created a lot of 'in the red' planets for funds.
This mega event only happened once to me, but I must say it was game-changing to the extreme, and not the way some are (as in the uber pirates are now here and you die - game over). I had a hard-save just before this mega event and so reloaded and it didn't happen, so I had to resort to taking a save a few turns into the mega-event and then expirmenting that way, but in the end I managed to win just because I largely ignored the new planets and just focused on conquering.