Um, no its not. Concentrating on frigates is actually a much better thing for the AI (and most players) to do. Capitalships are only useful if you can either get them to high levels or use their abilities for maximum effect. The AI is not very good at either, so using frigates is the better option as they have better stats per fleet supply and cost. So even if your idea reduces lag (I'm not sure if it would), it comes at the price of easier AI.

Also you should check if your problem occurs in single player. That's a much better test as it could just be your connection that's having problems.

Just as the post above you said, a frigate-heavy and capship-light fleet is better than the opposite. The problem is not so much with the AI's ship-building priorities so much as with your idea of what a good fleet should be. 50 supply worth of capital ships is not necessarily the same firepower as 50 supply worth of frigates.

While the more objects there are (like frigates), the slower the game runs, that alone shouldn't cause the game to freeze for minutes at a time (even if there are hundreds of them).

I have noticed peculiar pauses of a similar type in long AI games, but they rarely last more than 45 seconds.

If you have a lot of strikecraft (75+ squads), ordering them to do anything (or having them auto-attack) often causes the game to freeze up for a second or two when they re-target... but I have no idea what might cause minutes of nonresponsiveness.

All I can say is that it exist and its a major problem, has been for some time now even with the older patches.

Testing this out to see if we can reproduce. If the OP could please send in a dxdiag for the system(s) being used and a single-player game save file (zipped) where this is occurring to sinssupport@stardock.com, that would be great.

If it is Video, then its NVidia, I have all the latest drivers installed too.  I have had two differant Videos cards from NVidia, the one currently is a GTX 470 I originally had a GTX 270.  this has been going on with the game for a very long time, several patches from IC and several differant drivers over the past two years.

Ive always releated this pausing due to the mass amount of ships, but again, this issues seems to only happen after about 2.5 to 3 hours into a game.  I have played Single player games to and gotten the same results.

I have to add, that I did notice  right before the game pauses if you are giving commands or doing an upgrade to a Capship that the mouse acts very laggy and seems to hard to click on the icon. this I have noticed happening several times before the pauses hit.  Sometimes even during the lag when you click the mouse it would jump to another icon when giving that command.

Yarlen, I will send you that DXInfo shortly, thanks for ask and looking in to the issue.  Great game, love it as do my friends, but the pausing just drives you crazy when it happens.