Sorry if this is an inappropriate place to ask this question but here goes.

Do higher level AI difficult gain an economy boost/discount of some kind? Because I have been playing this beta a bunch (never played Sins before) and kept finding the AI a bit easy so I ramped up the difficulty to a mix of unfair and vicious level to see what went down. Throughout the entire game I was behind on my titan, where I am normally the first to knock one out, on my fleet sizes, defence sizes and really behind in research output.

However, at the end of the game the statistics showed that we had a pretty even distribution of planets, credit income, resource income and I couldn't find a significant factor in my expenses which explained either my money drain or the AI's gain.

I lost eventually holed up next to a starbase on 8 times speed trying to get all of my research done but double titan romping beats starbase and fleet ;(

Any thoughts would be great and, yes, it could totally be that I am a horrendous noob and can't manage my spending! lol