As above, kata Drengin.  They did colonize.  They allowed me to destroy their survey ship with impunity.  Never saw any Drengin war/battle ships/fleets.

Its alpha, so yeah, AI isn't really implemented yet.

I'm only a fan of game development, I don't have much technical knowledge, certainly not of strategic timing as technical expertise in when things are done in what order, so take my thought analysis on it with a grain of salt, but it would make sense to me to hold off on trying to write the code for AI until the basic rules and systems of gameplay are ironed out and stable.  In alpha, things are bound to change from iteration to iteration, so coding an AI now would be a waste; the AI has to be able to do everything the player can, but the term 'AI' is a bit of misnomer -- its a complex script that  governs how a faction strategizes, picks what technologies to research, improvements or ships to build, how large of a force to build up and where to place it, when it should recognize the player or another AI is about to attack and to muster its forces to prepare, etc.  When systems like research, planet development and combat are still in 'flux' as they are during alpha, a few lines of code changing that control these systems means the AI has to be rewritten to be able to use the system at all, and even moreso to use those systems wisely for its own competitive edge.  The UI (user interface -- the stuff we see on the screen and controls we have to click on) probably has a higher priority, especially given the alpha is public now.

I agree, if you don't have real insight into the development its better not to claim what state something is in.

AI also doesn't seem to build hardly anything on its planets, even its homeworld.  I have a lot of planets, all tiles filled on them, and yet the AI's homeworld had only a couple of improvements, most of its tiles are empty.  Again, "Not Fun."  AI is one of the last things to get implemented, I think, as I said -- after basic systems that essentially set the rules for how production, research, combat, etc. works.  AI can't be programmed to intelligently use controls that aren't there, and it would make sense to do all the AI stuff altogether, so after everything else has been implemented.