I'm playing a small galaxy run, started as the ready-formed UFP.

I got about 30-40 years into the game and tech-wise I feel like I'm doing well and rapidly unlocking things. Even with a couple of Constitution-class ships built my fleet power is what I'd expect for this stage; a couple of 5-6k fleets. I'm mainly hamstrung by the crew production requirements to expand even with every colony having crew-producing buildings.

The Klingons suddenly declared war on me, and I was shocked to see that they had a single main fleet (not including their Great Houses, which themselves were each about 2k power) of over 12k! Most of it made up of a swarm of corvette-sized ships and fighter supports.

I've never seen an AI opponent ever have the capacity to put out that kind of fleet so early on, and I've played a lot of hours in this mod. Is that a relatively new thing? Is it related to the 4.0+ updates from vanilla?