Leftover survey ship...

Yup. I just let it survey until there is nothing left. By that time I have ships that are much more powerful so I don't need it.

Never paid any particular attention to the stats though.

Warning! Cheese tactic!
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If you destroy the AI's survey vessels, they will not make another one and you can grab all the anomalies yourself.

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End cheese tactic. This works in 1.13.

Several times when I played the Survey Ship has been the most powerful ship in my fleet.. outgunning overlords and avatars.
If I remember correctly, I had a Survey Ship with something like 150 attack and 80 defense. Thats what I call a well-armed science ship LOL

Lothmorg, that isn't much news. Since the new Space Shark anomalies have been added, the AI loose their survey ships much more often, leaving your Survey Ship much more likely to build up.

There is a bug in AP 1.49J that causes the auto-survey to stop working sometimes, usually when it's picked up an anomaly right at the map edge.

It's a right pain trying to do it manually, so I end up just ignoring the Survey ship for the rest of the game

A few people have mentioned this in the bug report thread, so hopefully Stardock will fix it.

There's a few odd behaviors with auto-survey. Including it avoiding anomolies when it is the only survey ship in the galaxy (and sometimes when it isn't). I haven't seen it ignore any OLD anomaly, but I have seen it repeatily ignore some of the NEW anomaly types, regardless of where they are located on the map.

However, my favorite survey ship trick is leaving it on auto survey, and when all the anomolies have been harvested, using auto-pilot to send the ship to orbit one of my stars. When a new anomoly spawns, it will automatically leave orbit and go survey the newly appeared anomoly. And then you ship it back and repeat.

Very useful on maps that are large and smaller, where anomolies run out and you don't want to leave it lieing about somewhere.

1.49 its allowing you take over the minor races very early in the game, I rush for impulse drive to get my military transport and using the survey ship, I go with 500 million people on my transport and take over any minor in my area, this helps a lot specially when you get a bad starting situation. 2 or 3 extra planets come handy!!!

I find that keeping the minors alive sometimes spells the difference between losing and winning.

There's a cheesy tactic that helps here. Surround the minor-civ's home planet with 8 freighters (upkeep 0!). They can't be invaded. As long as they're not susceptible to culture-flipping, they're guaranteed to stay in the game (Alexians have low cultural resistance; Carinoids are nigh-unflippable with the recent culture changes).

The AIs don't appear to object to a protective blockade of someone they're at war with.

I like keeping a minor in the game, so that I can shift all my trade routes to them, denying the AI the benefit of my trade income. [In the early-game, I trade with one of the weaker AIs to make them like me and to give them a boost.] In fact, I may sell a planet to a minor just to let me establish good trade routes. (It turns out that trade route length + trade starbases mostly dominate the economy-effect of trade routes.)