Yup, I'm a programmer myself so I do tend to be a little over detailed in some of my bug reports. 
Well, that's always appreciated!
Though I did forget to note that I don't play with astro trains (just because I found them more annoying then interesting), but that probably doesn't affect things.
Yep, that's why I put the option there to turn them off. I think they add an interesting strategic element, especially with the newer Counter-Negative-Energy Turrets, but some people find them too annoying.
Though I normally give both the AIs and myself +30% to +50% resources bonuses so it probably doesn't help me with my getting-swamped-early problem.
Oh yeah, that will really cause you to get swamped more quickly.
I recalled someone else on the forum mentioning a similar problem with the auto-build as well. It's probably a rather rare case, but I really do use swarms of parasites a lot, so it's probably happened a little more often to me then most people. (And even then, I've only noticed it in 3 times out of my, well, lots of games.)
Yeah, I think Fiskbit mentioned it in terms of when there are two harvest points that are too close together. Yours was the first mention of it with other nearby ships (turrets, etc) also causing it.
A couple of the encounters were in the order of "queue 5 scout ships; queue 5 cruisers; hit tab to look over the map; tab back see my scout ships done and a cruiser popping out and a bunch of bombers heading for my base", but I suspect it would probably have been only one, maybe 2 bombers if I wasn't giving the AIs +50% resources.
Yep, that, and/or if you had the cruiser out first, along with some turrets near you space dock. The added resource handicaps will really increase the early game ferocity of the AI, I suspect.
I did just start a few AI 7 games quickly to test things out, and found one of the better solutions seemed to be just tossing up 3 of the short-range turrets and a tractor beam around each wormhole quickly.
Yes, that will really help. I do that, too. There is no ideal early-game build pattern, because it all depends on what might be coming in at you, how many wormholes you have, etc, etc. That's something I really wanted to emphasize in my game, because I was so tired of other games where I commonly would figure out an ideal build path for my civ after a few months of play, and then there were no real decision points for me in the really early game. Of course, that's just playing against the AI, not other humans, but still. The goal here was to make players think about their strategy and try new things at every stage of each campaign.
Also found that a mix of parasites and cruisers seemed to be very useful as well, or even just pure parasites right at the start. They seem to work nicely on most of the things they send you and with an engineer nearby a second later and you've got a bunch of nice shiny new ships.
Yeah, I'd imagine that would work well. Parasites have to deal the finishing blow to a ship in order to convert it, so the slow reload speed of cruisers would pair pretty nicely with that.
I think my reaction to this was because the different AI levels actually play really differently, rather then a gradual curve. Like I think it was the AI 5 to 6 transition where I hadn't had to use the tachyon defensive turrets at all at 5, then suddenly at the next AI level higher I got hit within the first 10 to 15 minutes with raptor ships slipping in to hassle my harvesters. And I think the 6 to 7 one really upped the early game aggression.
A lot of that depends on the specific scenario and AI types you are playing with. Some AI types are more aggressive than others, and also certain maps will lend themselves to doing more aggressive things or not (if they have a lot of ingress points to your planets, they'll use them, etc). Also there is a lot of emergence in the AI behavior, so depending on what you do or don't do, it might make wildly different decisions from one game to the next.
That makes the AI difficulty very hard to predict, kind of like playing another human player in an online pvp league. Even if the other player is ranked about like you, their specific style could prove harder or easier to handle, as can the various choices they make. You don't often see that with AI in games, though, so I can understand how that might be unsettling at times. I feel like the difficulty progression is fairly linear overall, but the AI does learn a lot of new tactics between 5, 6, and 7, so that does change things a bit also, in addition to the other more unpredictable aspects. If you were to play (say) 100 games of difficulty 5, and 100 games of difficulty 6, I think the average difficulty of those games would even out to 6 being a slight step above 5, but not a huge one.
Though, the increases in difficulty are geometric, I suppose I should say. The difference between 1 and 2 is really negligible, but the difference between 9 and 10 is the difference between the blitzkrieg and the apocalypse. This was just kind of how it worked out, in some ways trying to do difficulty levels with emergent AI is like herding cats, but I think overall it works and is reasonable with each step up. It's at least on par with other RTS games in that regard, in my opinion (but only because we have so many different levels).
Their benefits vary a great deal, even when I'm playing with them I can get them to either be really useful, or just your average fighter.
Yep, that happens with most ships, not just parasites. Depending on the unit mix that you have, and that the AI has, traditionally-weak or traditionally-strong ships can become heroes or weaklings, respectively. So you can't get into too many rote habits between different campaigns (again, that way the players have to always be thinking and evaluating the situation, rather than just falling back on learned patterns, or at least that's the intent).
but the electric ships seemed to fire as soon as the first ship appeared through the wormhole so they missed all but the first ship (either that or they never really did much damage?).
Each electric ship does low damage, but they also hit everything nearby. Grouping a dozen of them can kill a whole swath of enemy ships, though. But in this case, you are right that they will blow their first shot on just the first guy coming in, which isn't helpful. Shuttles do stink at wormhole defense, that's quite true. Lightning turrets have the same problem. But if you pair those with tractor beams, the second shot from them can be really devastating to the enemies.
When I'm actually running around taking over the resource points and killing the emplacement thing on top of them, the parasites are either helpful (and the fighters are worthless), or the parasites are no more useful then the regular fighters.
Fighters should be a lot more useful in offensive combat in the full 1.007 release that just came out yesterday. I'll be interested to hear what people think on that front.
If you have the grouping set so they all travel at their own speed, the parasites will normally arrive in firing range about the same time as the bombers/carriers at the back are in firing range, so they tend to finish off quite a lot of the turrets, etc so you get a lot of pretty useless turrets floating around the map, but you do get a few ships at the same time (and of course the fighters get there long before anyone else does, and get completely wiped off the map not even being useful as chaff). If you "group" them all together, everything will come in range of the bombers/carriers long before the parasites/fighters get in range, so they'll usually already be dead, so no parasites are made.
That all makes sense, and is as I would expect. You can delete the useless turrets you captured if you don't want them (if they are using up ship cap that you could be using elsewhere).
They seem to need to be made less killy, the less of a threat they have against them. Maybe have some sort of degradation of their skills they longer they're sitting at a planet and not doing anything? I'm sure that it would be easy enough to make up fluff about how they need to be in constant analysis of their prey to perform at top ability or something, the more difficult part would be to code it so that they would, for example, have only a 50% chance to "parasite" the ship, for their first couple of shots if they haven't fired in the last 5 or 10 game minutes or something.
I'm going to start with just making them more expensive, but something like this is an interesting idea, too.
On a related note, are the Fighters actually good for anything other then chaff?
Fighters are strong against basically 1/3 of the ships in the game. In particular, they are also the best thing to use against enemy starships, or enemy cruisers. They'll tear right through cruisers in particular. Their problem in past releases was that they were dying too easily when in the middle of a big fray, but that's been fixed. They can be deadly against certain targets, though.
You need bombers for force fields, you need cruisers for special forces bases, but there's nothing I know of that "needs" a fighter to take down.
Cruisers will eat bombers alive, and cruisers are relatively ineffective against each other. So to protect your bombers from enemy cruisers, the best course by far is to have fighters of your own. And agaisnt starships, fighters will do much better than most of your other ships.
Maybe give them an extra bonus to super-fortresses/etc since they're so small that they're much harder for the massive wall-of-weapons to aim and hit, and they get bonuses to damage because they get to "shoot in the exhaust port"?
Hahaha, yes, this is exactly why I gave them bonuses against starships.
