.... You know what that means... that means I just lost a whole aspect of my life to this game. seeing as how there seems to be so many possibilities I have yet to have any extreme ai awesomeness yet. Although right now it seems to just be probing my defenses which I'm not to fond of lol.
Hehe, yeah, the AI doesn't really shine until the mid to late parts of the game, when it has enough ships and resources to be properly diabolical. 
Welcome to the forums.
Yea, this game has hundreds of hours of content even ignoring the millions of maps. As Vinrath said any single game plays with a small subset of the ships included in your game. One map seed will yield different starting ships for you just by changing the ships between complex, simple and (I don't remember the middle choice), Turning expansions on and off in combination will quite often change your starting ships. [base + 3exp + 3 ship settings = more that 40 player starting mixes per map seed] Then many of the AI have a preferred ship set - so changing AI leads to different opposing ships. Then Add on a certain randomness to the bonus ships any particular AI gets and one map could yield over 100 slightly different games.
I have played a couple hundred hours and not seen every ship from the base and 1st 2 expansions yet.
X4000 goal is to have around 1000 ship types in the game. He built the game for himself and his weekly play group and wants the game to be interesting for at least another 10 years. 4.0 is a major evolution of the game from thousands of little ships to a mixture of little and medium ships.
Enjoy and welcome back Vinraith
