Claymore926

I got hit that hard on a huge map with 8 Easy AI (was 9 but i killed one early) that I had to do a rapid migration all the way across the system to a more defendable group of planets with my entire fleet. My last planet had about 1000/6000 health left when I made a new colony on the homeworld of the AI that took my last planet. I'm now in his former teritory, he is now in the old teritory of the one i killed and my old are is now controled by 2 AI that have now gone to war against each other.<br

The ships you are encountering are pirate ships that spawn round all neutral planets at game start and will not respawn after you kill them. This is to stop players sending out a bunch of colony ships at game start and claiming everything they can as fast as they can. The pirates will spawn groups of attack ships every 15 mins at thier base (which is heavily fortified BTW) and pick either a random target, or the player with the highest bounty (see Black Market screen for timer and bounty levels)