Unless you're playing on the insane difficulties, it should take hours (at least one, likely a lot longer) for the AI to start building superweapons... especially if you aren't on Faster speeds.

And even when they start firing, they shouldn't be hard at all to defend against, if you have some idea of what you're doing. For the TEC superweapon, build a SB and upgrade with planet protection,  for the Advent superweapon you can probably just ignore it, for the Vasari superweapon, just hope it doesn't hit your front-line world and you'll be fine. Build a starbase if you want to help defend.

That said, it is possible to mod out superweapons if their difficulty (what difficulty) is too much for you.

I should also probably say to make sure and make it a separate mod, do not replace the original entity files.

It was, untill they patched it in, quite recently. I can't tell the exact patch which brought it, but at the latest it was the 1.2 patch for diplo and the equivalent ones for entrenchment and plain sins.

Now some AIs are very fond of superweapons, while others don't build them at all (since I usually go with random AI behaviour I can't tell you which ones). Even on normal difficulty the AI will build superweapons and on hard and insane it seems to take them just a bit over one hour to develop them and build the first one (on giant random galaxy with normal income rates).

With the resource handicap, playing on large maps against cruel or vicious AI should really not be attempted unless you enjoy painfully long games or just to prove you can take everything that single player Sins can through at you.

5 scouts omfg thats points wasted thats a ship wasted you only 1 scout playing for 2-3 days you have time to move that 1 lonely scout to each planet as long as you keep your defense a head of the planets you should never have to go back defending at the sun because the AI will phase jump to the sun from other stars a lot you have to move very fast to take the entire star you start in there can be no allience putting starbases in blackholes and 1 starbase every where and i mean everywhere you can not leave a single planet or even just space junk not defended with a star base most cases you have the best defense moving those fleets near a starbase when the ai decides its time to attack and I will say it is never just 1 ai attacking me they all attack at the same time I use up to 8 players and I never have an allience thats worthless its me against the universe on very hard and i like it if i give the ai a change to bull up after I take the first star it makes it even more fun because of how hard it can be to take out a planet that has 150ships 6 captial ships and a star base with planet defenses and hordes of mines you have to travel around I have a few bombers but I never rely on those because the AI has hordes of fighters I build fleets and fleets of fighters as long as you up the tech on the fighter weapons to max they will deal the damage needed to take out anything and why wait for bombers to destroy a starbase WTF mkove your dam capitail ships in thats what they are for have them attack that dam thing I do not lose capital ships all my capital ships at lvl 10 very early because i move them to attack everything and i mean everything if youm sit and do nothing you will just die but if you defend with an offence you will have a 50/50 chance at killing them before they kill you.

Yeay AI have super-weapons, glad they all build them at the same time....

Thanks, Wrath. Reading that was beginning to hurt my head. Assume he didn't bother to see where your link led.