two newbie questions about mods

[PerpetualNewbie]

I've been playing SEIV against the computer for the Last year or so, and am finally getting around to trying out mods (and trying out making my own). I read the tutorial (very useful), but I'm left with a couple of questions...

1) How well does the AI take into accound mods. For instance (not necessarily a real example), if I require Physics level 3 to make a battleCruiser, will the AI take that into account or will it just never make battlecruisers? If I use someone's mod which adds a number of new ships, will the AI try to make them?

2) How do you adjust the research costs used in the game start...I'd like to make the expensive research costs more expensive, but can't find a value in the Data/settings.txt file.

Thanks,
Perpet