AI need to do a better job with fleets

And I get the Mercenary ship which gives me 250bc in salvage credits for every combat that it survives, and pick up 250bc for every individual ship that I pick off.   Makes back my money before too long.

Sometimes I will trade (give really) a bunch of my older ships to a weak AI ally. They never seem to just form them into fleets, and the ships end up dying one at a time.

Yes, this is probably the biggest issue of the ai right now. It has to taught to build better fleet, but I also think a mechanism should be in place to prevent certain strategies. Like using 24 speed transports to take out un-or lightly defended planets by dodgeing ai's slow fleets. ( I suggested that invasions should require an initiation turn, but this is an other matter). The small scattered fleets are useless, just as the planet defenders right now.

I'd be happy if they just bothered to use fleets... PERIOD.

http://i.imgur.com/ZafObVE.jpg

Look at pink, the "strongest" military faction in the game. Considered more powerful than me even. Yet all they have is a mass produced cluster of rubbish ships.

http://imgur.com/a/FkvpI

Meanwhile, here is my biggest fleet vs their biggest fleet. They don't even compare. I got an actual flagship, all my best mercs, and filled it with tiny sized ships that can do more damage and have better defenses than their medium ships. If we ever went to war I'd destroy them with no effort. There's like no reason for them to be spread out like that.

He has 88 logistics. Why can't the AI just fill a fleet till it gets to the cap, then make a new fleet? What is the point of having literally hundreds of individual ships that do nothing? Why even research logistics if you aren't using it? It's just totally anti fun. It's not fun because the faction will always lose a war because your fleet will just steamroll the ships individually. It's also not fun to have to chase after every single thing all spread out... instead of having like a dozen or so more significant battles. Battles worth watching in the real time simulation. Instead I'm forced to hunt down tiny pathetic ships and click them like I'm pacman collecting white pellets zoomed out at the max zoom range so its as fast as possible.

The crap ships are the results of it spamming them early on, it doesn't seem to stop spamming them because it doesn't tech very well so it spams hundreds of them and doesn't really progress properly into creating more effective ships. It clearly techs the hulls but it still producing the large hull with basic 1 damage weapons.

I think the AI gets screwed with not knowing what to do with these ships, because most of the time they aren't capable of fighting the ships you're attacking with. It's like something is telling it to do two different things.

I've knocked on the AI's door really early on with a medium hull with ancient missile defence system that's 46 attack at the 1 damage stage of the game. It's decision seemed to be form small fleets near it with random singular ships and then attacking rather than group up properly then attacking. It's been told to soften the target until a fleet can finish the job or it's ship of the line can. It doesn't understand how to "soften up a target "properly though.

It can't drop the shields and focus the ancient missile system ship so it would have to attack it will lots of fleets in quick succession to stop it even then it would be a major maybe.

The only time I've really seen good ships out of the AI is in super long games, a few times with my custom factions and once with slynee which were I say moderately good ships.

Basically I think the AI acts the way it does because it know it's *******! It can't use the force, it can't fight those star destroyers and it can't repel firepower of that magnitude.

 I noticed it is more pronounced in games where the AI has tons of money. They will always go and "rush"/ buy a ship and for w/e reason they always choose to rush cheap ships way more often than rushing good ships.

So the Ai actually becomes worse in some cases as higher difficulties because of the credits cheats etc.  Since the AI will spend all its credits and since something always needs to be built/bought it gets really wonky if the AI has lots of money.

But that said i have tested some games where i unlock and trade the AI all the hull sizes and decent weapons right away and they still build like 25:1 small crappy ships to large/huge ships. Even if they have 9999999 credits and all the techs.

I dont mind a good mix of fleets instead of just spamming 1 ship across your entire civ. But i think there needs to be some tweaks. I think this can be done in modding on priorities i just dont remember where it is. 

I'm getting an idea, and it doesn't involve an ally being given those ships.   LOL.