I posted this on another thread, but wanted to see if I could get another thread focusing on AI enhancement suggestions, post 1.2 beta.

First, let me say I do AI work for a living, so I have VERY high respect, tolerance, and understanding for you who do this. It is clearly the most difficult to implement part of any game, and probably always will be until someone invents the positronic brain.

Just to iterate what I see as necessary core improvements to the AI:

1. Continue to improve the AI's ability to manage improvements on planets:
a. Build associated buildings on proper resources. I see things like "planetary defense" on a "prairie" quite often.
b. Quit building farms "everytime" a planet hits the pop cap, and then some. Use some algorithm like "build farms until the total reaches 10% of the available squares" or something.
c. 30% of the squares having planetary defenses makes no sense. Screw planetary defenses. They don't help much anyway as they thus far have never prevented me from easily taking the AI's planets, it only costs me a few more solders. This would be MUCH better spent on manufacturing and building ships to defend planets with.
d. Where is the manufacturing? In the game I am playing (and most previous games recently), the AI builds WAY too few manufacturing centers.
e. Put a big-time cap on influence buildings letting other important structures lag behind. Influence is quite moot if you can't build your navy fast enough to thwart my attack.
e1. same with any other non-econ, tech, or manuf buildings like moral. You simply need to live with a pop cap, influence cap, and moral cap, then deal with it as you can without sacrificing econ, tech, or manuf.
f. Intelligently manage econ vs. tech vs. manufacturing planets. Too often I see mixes of them on the same planet, which creates major inefficiencies, or at least losses of compounding buildings.
g. Focus WAY more on building infrastructure. I see the AI focusing way to hard on building a navy early, clearly costing money and time to build and maintain.

2. Build killer fleets. I see small, and clearly ineffective fleets by the AI, even when it would "appear" they have maxed out their tech tree, making them easy to defeat. I don't field any fleets that are not as powerful as possible if I intend it to be my main attack force (I do small fast ships for transport interception). Quit fielding many small fleets as they don't even dent my large fleets.

3. Build the best ship possible at all times. The AI builds wimpy ships.

4. Quit over-building transports. The AI builds them willy-nilly, and sends them apparently randomly all over the place. Only build them when you have specific goals/planets you choose to take. Pick a planet that you can attack with fleets, then soon after hit with transports that only leave a "safe area" or a planet when said target planet is ready to take (ie no ships in orbit, or nearby). In late game, put a gazillion engines on transports. Wasting population as I pick off transports for target practice really hurts the AI.

6. Only build and send transports when it is safe. As I knock off the AI's navy, it still keeps building transports and escorts. WHY??? It should be purely focusing on getting strong fleets together to thwart the now stronger opponent before resuming the building of said ships.

5. Guard transports with killer fleets. Screw escorts completely. They are basically useless.

6. Quit building 10 gazillion unused freighters running them all over the universe in random patterns. This is annoying, and clearly inefficient. It is ok to have a few backups, but zillions is ridiculous.

7. Have the AI focused on goals like taking the closest planets one-at-a-time, guarding its space with killer fleets, and focusing on taking out its opponents killer fleets.

8. The AI should be able to switch attack methods once it sees that I have switched countering its defense strategy, and the same with my defense strategy. The AI may actually do this, but once I have obliterated any large fleets, it seems to just build transports and escorts, so I wouldn't see it.

10. The bottom line is, on the highest difficulty level, large galaxy, when the AI is 4x ahead of me in all stats catagories, it should plain and simple, kick my ass every time "in the end game" regardless of any minor cheating I do in the early game to keep up. Just for reference, on my last suididal game that I won, I gave myself 10000 bc, made earth and mars 26 planets, and restarted until I had 1 800% manuf resource on earth. This really isn't much considering I was only able to colonize a total of 8 worlds before the rest were already populated by the AI. I was WAY behind until I was able to build a 125 attack, 27 defense (of whatever the most powerful AI opponent attack method is), and 43 move ship, stack 5 of these together, build about 5 fleets of these, then at that point, I have never seen any game where the AI can over-come this. If the AI happens to still be utra-powerful, like in one game, one AI opponenet had conqued everything else except my 8 planets, they put up an ok fight against me, but in this case, I focused on bringing the most experienced ships into a fleet, and continued to build that fleet's experience until its hit points were so high, it was unstoppable, thus giving me that final guarantee I needed.

11. Now to wrap it up, since the AI planets are poorly built, it just can't build the ships to keep up. Even though the AI has 50 planets to my 8, I still can out-build it, and over-power it with my fleets.