Frogboy over-reacts

It sounds like it was smart.

It knew you wanted them and selling the ship would give it to you so...

I agree with ForesterSOF.  The AI figured out you wanted it for something far too valuable.  So, it wasn't going to give it to you.  I would do something like that myself.  

It may not even know what it was you had in mind, just that you wanted something badly.  I could see logic like that being somewhere in the decision tree. I am not saying Brad doesn't over-react, but he is also mean and devious underneath that smiling gleeful gamer face.  I wouldn't put anything past him and his AI.  And I like that.

If the ai had picked off all three resources, I might buy that. If the ai had refused to sell at any price, I might buy that. As it were, they proved that they had a price but it was so ridiculous they passed up a chance to damage me for one lousy resource. I was willing to pay way more than the ship and the resources involved was worth, but certainly not what they were willing to take.

Bottom line, if they are willing to trade a ship for a price, that price should be high, but not ridiculous given the stakes involved. I assume the trade value is based on multiples of the item value + diplomatic considerations, (friend pays 2X worth, Enemy 4X worth or nothing) Someone plugged in excessive numbers because they were pissed that the ai had been selling their ships too cheap.     

Yeah, this was hit with a sledgehammer, not a nerf bat.  The problem was selling colony ships, survey ships and constructors early game.  But this nerf just changes the trade value of every ship.  So if some empire has some crappy out-dated small ship you can't trade for that either (the cost of these small, crappy ships is the same as a colony ship or constructor).  The nerf should have been to specific ship types, not everything.  The AI should value ships it needs - especially ships that cost administrators, but later in the game they should be looking to get rid of their old, out-dated stuff for whatever they can.  There's no subtlety or elegance with this change.  

The AI should always value constructors and colony ships pretty high, unless there are no more colonizable planets.  If it doesn't, you buy its entire fleet of constructors for a couple techs for no admins, and it loses admins.  It also had values warships  too cheaply before, but a bit too expensive now.  Before the nerf, you could buy every warship every AI owned for practically nothing,  and the only thing that stopped you was maintenance costs, which some techs can stop.

The root of the problem is that the AI doesn't know how to individually value each ship like a human does.  It doesn't even put starbases in the right spot, and skips precursor relics all the time.  If it doesn't understand those basic things, it has no idea how to value a ship.  It also shouldn't be having a lot of constructors built sitting around doing nothing, but it oftentimes does.

But in general, an early game constructor or colony ship should be worth somewhere north of 1kbc or more, and warships should be priced according to era, where as tech advances, older ships get a bit cheaper, and the newest ships worth a pretty good amount.  Of course, exact values would have to be tweaked and there would likely always be exploits when dealing with AI.