I'd like to first say I enjoy this game quite a bit. However there are a few concerns I have.

Most notably, the AI.

General Behavior:

The AI, regardless of difficulty setting and management type (aggressive, economic, etc) avoids fleet to fleet battles like the plague unless their fleet is much MUCH bigger. Game after game, The enemy AI fleet continually runs from the other even if they are mostly balanced. When I attack them, they retreat and stay one jump away from my advance. They fall back, I take their territory. I move up to the next, they skirmish a little, and fall back again. Over and over until one of two things occur. One, I finally pin them in to their last territory and they actually fight to the death. Or second, they scurry off to some neutral area and simply wait to be eliminated.

And roughly half the time they will let a capital ship get destroyed attacking a territory of that is only defended by structures. Letting turrets shred them when they could easily retreat or get out of range.

They do not make make large numbers of capital ships. Even in large systems when they have the time and resources to do so. I don't recall ever seeing an AI have more than 3 or 4 capital ships at any one time. I've seem them make pretty impressive fleets, but not enough capitals to really give the fleet staying power and more offensive punch. One of the reasons why human player fleets usually easily decimate AI fleets in my experience. The "aggressive" AI seems even worse at this. I see them using capitals even less, typically having more frigates instead.

Another major problem is with AI players.. I played a really large map with my bro, 4 v 4. 2 AI on our team, vs, 4 other AI. With us doing most of the grunt work our AI teammates built a single extremely massive fleet. We were playing with large fleet capacity I wouldn't doubt they filled all their supply on the fleet. However, through out the entire 8 hour game they were almost entirely defensive. They would take our "defend here" orders maybe 40% of the time, but completely ignored our "attack here" orders, even if they said stuff like "Gotcha" and whatnot. They would set up just outside hostile territory and simply sit there, doing nothing. I would send them an attack order on the very next territory, a puny asteroid base 1/12th of their fleet could have easily decimated. But for the last 2 hours of the game, they simply waited next to that territory doing nothing. Sure they kept that escape route locked down but they could have conqured the opposing AI with extreme ease since they had mostly nothing left. Another annoying problem I've encountered with AI team mates is they will spam me about one of their colonies being attacked by like 5 siege frigates - while their entire fleet is in the connecting territory obviously more than capable of handling the threat.

Economy:

Fleet upkeep mechanics are bad. And I also have theory which I will soon be testing that this is one of the things that holds AI players back since they commonly like to build large numbers of ships - which means they must research many levels of fleet supply early on in the game. And the fleet upkeep costs in this game are extremely brutal. Simply having the capability to have a large fleet means you pay upkeep. I just played in a test galaxy where I had no ships whatsoever, yet I was paying insane amounts of resources for my "fleet upkeep" simply because I researched it. In a large galaxy with many fronts to defend, you have to have large fleet. And even if you don't have a fleet or it gets destroyed, you're still crippling your economy to pay for the non-existant fleet. It doesn't make sense. And I think it takes away from the game. My second most major concern after the AI quirks.

I like the pace of this game over all, but I think resource income is too low, making of lot of "pure waiting time" in which you have absolutely nothing to do but wait for more resources to come in. Just watching the resource ticks come in slowly. But of course, that could simply be my personal opinion but I still figured I'd mention it. Refineries are minor suppliments, they have to be in operation for a long time to simply pay for their own construction.

General Gameplay:

Autouse of abilities. I like this feature as it reduces unrealistic levels of micromangement. However in some situations it is counter productive to it's on goal. For example, I commonly see my Dunov class ships use their ability which causes strike craft to collide into the target ship when there are no strike craft present or they very far away. Additionally, this ability seems to mostly do nothing. I've seen it work quite well from time to time, but most often it doesn't seem to work even when you use it on a ship that is surrounded by strike craft. I've even tried waiting for craft to already be moving towards the target I use it on. It doesn't seem to have any effect. Also they refuse to autouse their shield restore unless every point restored will not be wasted. Which means once the Dunov is leveled up, it's mostly useless other than for capital ships. In general this is probably a good thing but I would like to see them use it on at least cruisers, if their antimatter pool is already full. Otherwise it's probably still best it ignore them. I haven't played the other factions nearly as much as TEC but I would gather you might be able to find similar issues with their capitals and the autouse of abilties. I know they shouldn't be "on autopilot" but the captain of that ship should be competent enough to know a little better.

 Thanks for reading!