Before we start, for relevance I have a Dell XPS gaming laptop with 8800s in SLi

Yesterday I was playing Advent vs Advent Hard AI as I haven't really tried Advent before so wanted to ease myself in to it.  For practice I had built one of every cap ship and each one was level 6+, I also had almost a maxed out (level 3 fleet upgrade) fleet of illums and crusaders with a small compliment of defence ships.  The AI was amassing a fleet just the other side of the phase line to where I was massing.  He had a compliment of cap ships but lower level as I had killed a couple of his cap ships early game.

Once I had got my fleet ready I jumped to where the AI was keeping his fleet, most of my cap ships had any useful stuff on auto cast.  My fleet jumped in to the grav well at the exact location the AI was preparing, almost in the middle of them, as my fleet left phase space I had something like a 15 second game freeze, followed by 1 fps for about 5 seconds then followed by another massive game freeze.  Eventually the game come back and it hadn't been going on without the graphics, the fleets were still there as before.  What caused the freeze?  AI struggling under the circumstances?  Or was it that big swirly Advent ability that makes it hard to see anything?

Strangely but not connected to the technical side, when the game came back to me I looked on the left hand side of the screen where the fleets are shown as simbals and I watched the Green (AI) simbals all dissapear within (what felt like) about 10 to 15 seconds, I thought he must have been phase jumping but looking back at the main display my fleet had wiped his fleet of comparable size, what the hell did that?  Was it the Crusaders aura or what?  Some cap abilities?