Better ability autocast selection. (This will probably be one of the hardest things.)

If I have 100 Stilakus Subverters with Teleport Disable (Whatever it's called) and they are set to autocast their ability, they will all pick one ship and disable it.

I would like a better target process for abilities of all kinds. If it doesn't stack, then don't stack it.

Hopefully this makes sense.

This should be top on the list! If they ever learn not to charge a SB semi right. We are all doomed. They have moments when they do it right, but add a fleet to next to the SB and they get a bit stupid.

The rest of the list is would be icing on the cake.

Personaly I find the AI fleet very diverse and very capaible to fight fleet to fleet.

If you took MP fleet composition, you end up with spam of one unit or another. *Cough*Carriers*Cough*LRF*Cough*

I think you should get started on that right away, Thoumsin. We'll expect your self-learning AI to be presentable in a couple months.

One simple (?) fix might be to limit the number of caps and starbases that the AI builds.  The limit could be based on the amount of time into the game.  For the first hour, no more than 2 caps at once, etc.  The AI could also be instructed to focus on spamming out LRFs and flaks with a small percentage of carriers/fighters (in an attempt to mitigate bomber spam).

This is where things get really tough.  How do you program the AI to decide which side of the gravity well to jump into?  Can you teach it to "kite" its ships around so as to avoid being chased by Vasari starbases?  Can you teach it to make bomber spam when needed to counter starbases?  Can you teach a Vasari AI to build a starbase at the right place and to then manage it properly so as to kill an enemy (stationary) starbase.  Ironically, Entrenchment and the addition of the starbases really weakened the AI relative to human players.  It added a new layer of strategic complexity to the game, which was a very welcome addition, but it came at the expense of the AI.

I think the AI should be taught to counter enemy fleets better - eg. if enemy has X frigates of type A and Y frigates of type B, the AI should build Z frigates of type C to counter most effectively. So, if the human enemy spams LRF, the AI will plug the numbers into its formula and conclude that it needs to spam flak.

I don't think it would be that hard to create a formula such as this.

It would also be essential to fix the suicide-on-starbases tactic the AI always uses. It would also be nice, as mentioned, if the autocasts were fixed so they don't all target the same frigate and waste nearly all of it.

Also: have the AI *prioritize* targets. If there's an enemy ship in the gravity well, the AI should assess its threat ("is it a siege frigate? do I need to kill it? or is it just a lone mostly-harmless scout or flak frigate?") and conclude when it would be best to ignore it and when it would be best to engage the enemy fleet.

Sometimes, they just pointlessly autocast..  I mean, I understand why, but in some cases, POH for instance gets used improperly as a result because the enemy AI thinks "Ooh, my cooldown is done and I have the antimatter, so I'm going to spam POH on random units that have no effect on the battle."

And if they do manage to adapt to your fleet, then could they potentially do so faster?  So that hard isn't just the AI with extra money, but actually is better at countering you.

Doesn't sound like it'd be that different from auto-attack (and auto-colonize) behavior, after warping in...

What I'm thinking is auto-warping and strategizing, not just auto attack which I rely on anyway.

So what it comes down to is that to feed my laziness, the devs have to give us a modabble AI

Something the AI is greatly lacking in is the understanding of how to expand quickly.

If I could, I would program the Cruel and Vicious AI to expand at the maximum possible colonization speed (eg. 5 or 6 planets by 10 minutes if map is a random small 1v1) using the method I try to use. If the planet types and number of enemy ships can be processed through an AI program, it would be doable.

The current AI's expansion rate is horribly slow, even on the harder settings - it often takes the AI more than 5 minutes to defeat the neutral ships on a planet and to move on.

Yeah, the AI should learn NOT to move into range of starbases/stationary defenses if it doesn't have the overwhelming advantage.

If it's just anticipating fleet-to-fleet combat, though, if the AI builds units reasonably intelligently, I don't think there'd be that much of a need for a reworking on that front.

Right, those AIs get a huge income bonus. I was thinking more along the lines of teaching it how to expand quickly given very little research and extremely limited funds (like humans). I guess for that to be more useful there would have to be more of a differentiation between AI income bonus and AI playing ability.

It would be great (but probably unrealistic) if you could control two sliders or buttons when creating AI, to modify their income multiplier and/or their skill - otherwise, this quicker-AI-expansion idea of mine wouldn't be worth as much due to the harder AI's ability to simply spam attack units.

That would definitely be nice...