After a long break I recently bought the entrenchment expansion and have noticed something i don't remember happening before, the AI seems to devote very little of its fleet logistics to capital ships.

Using the end game graphs, the computer had the same fleet size researched, as well as max number of capital ships, but consistantly game to game, it only uses between 1/2 to 3/4 of its max capital ship slots.  Considering a lot of the capital ship's abilities only get better as you have larger fleets, this seems like a very odd mechanic.

The example i have in my head is I beleive both the AI and I had a max fleet of 1360-ish, and 8 or so max capital ships.  This is where we fought, and even with the fight at the AI's planet and with a defenses, he lost about half of his fleet, and only killed about 9 of my frigates.  Looking at the graphs at the end, of his 8 max, he only had 5 capital ships.

I wouldn't even chalk it up to player smarts vs AI, as in this case, I essentially let the AI control my fleet, they were set up to auto stay in range of my healing ships, but other than that i didn't do anything, and my fleet still rolled over them.

Is this something where the computer reseraches fleet size first, and then just goes and uses up all of its fleet before it finishes capital ship crew research?

I like the larger games, which due to time reasons are often not realistic to do on multiplayer, so wondering why the computer makes such a choice.