Questions:

[Lord Of Nothing]

The AI shouldn't be shooting at the Zenith trader, should it?
The AI Dragons shouldn't be leaving the core worlds, surely? (Diff 9)
What are the odds of not getting a single Outguard Beacon in a 170 planet galaxy?

[BadgerBadger]

The AI shouldn't be shooting that the zenith trader; if it is please mantis + savegame

Dragons can go anywhere the praetorian guard can go, which is something like 4 hops from the AI homeworld. This has very different impact on gameplay depending on map type (X vs snake in particular), so it's somehting to keep in mind when picking a map for Spire campaigns.

If you are starting a new game and don't have the outguard then that's probably a bug. Quickstart? New custom game? We had a similar problem with the AI Reserves not being in new games a few patches ago.

[Lord Of Nothing]

Thanks for answering - the Z trader thing is happening regularly enough that it's definitely the AI doing it, I'll try and get a save where it's actually clear.
The dragons thing- yep, it's an X map.
The outguard thing is in my current game, which was a custom start - not sure what version that was started under since there were quite a few hotfixes recently, so I'll poke it a bit and see if it still happens in a new one.
EDIT: Poking complete: I tested a couple of variants of the Outguard thing, as far as I can tell it only seems to happen in campaigns created by using the lobby option from an existing campaign, and then only for some existing campaigns.
The Zenith trader thing I've put on mantis.

[Lord Of Nothing]

Okay, new question: How do the Speedgroups work?