As far as I know, yes. I'm almost certain, too, because I have played with that option and I think that if they had been trading amongst themselves I would have gotten my ass kicked.
I just did a little simulation on my homemade excel combat simulator. A 60 HP ship with first strike going up against 3 ships with 20 attack, 5 defense, 24 HP. In this simulation, all defenses are matched to the attacker's attack type for both sides. Based on the idea that defenses are smaller than offensive modules, I assumed that this one ship could have 5 defense or 3 attack, and that it could fit 12 such groups. So it could have at best 36 attack with no defense, or 60 defense with no attack
The way I ended up doing it was going 70% research bonuses and then just doing the vast majority of all the research for everybody. I colonized a bunch, but left the ones closest to the DLs for the Korx and Drath to take. Then I teched like hell and just bought everything I needed with the starting funds and the proceeds from selling my research to the galaxy (I feel that buying and reselling other civs' tech is lame, so I didn't do it, but I researched way more techs than all the rest combined)
GalCiv2 Forums
Thank you very much, CariElf. I did both of those things and it works now!
Edit: Ignore this post, I got help in my other thread. Go there if you have the same problem: https://forums.galciv2.com/?ForumID=162&AID=107988
Edit: I meant to post this to bug reports, I don't really know what's going on with this forum. Background: So the game kept crashing whenever I tried to start a mission, so I tried to update my drivers, but it was difficult because NVIDIA doesn't support their GO cards, and the drivers on Toshiba's site were from December 2002. So I went to all sorts of sites and FINALLY found some that worked. So now I can play. <BR