Really?  I'd say the AI is a lot better than with beta 5 at that, but while it is lacking, it is building.

The AI is still building shipyards first on just about every colony.

I'm not sure the AI has been informed of all the changes.  Shipyards use to be easy to build, now they are quite costly.  I have found though that you can bi pass this by creating a constructor and then building a ship yard...much cheaper.  This seems kinda silly that you can do that if the change was indeed meant to make ship yards harder to get / easier to defend early game.

I still like the change. No more camping shipyards. Also the travel time kind of makes up for the constructor cost.

Playing with all the AI on Gifted. Every AI planet I've conquered has been very poorly built up. No focusing on manufacturing at all. They build ships at each planet's shipyard before having built up the planet.

Hovering over AI planets to get their stats. Most have very dismal manufacturing and science production.

Hope Stardock fixes it.

Perhaps someone could create a game mod that greatly simplifies building up a planet. Makes everything so easy that the AI can't fail at it.

Remove everything complicated from the tech tree that concerns planet management. Change the adjacency bonuses to 1% or remove them. Make building upgrades super cheap.

I've also seen this.  Conquered two Yor planets so far.  On the first, there was one Yor Manfacturing Building.  One the other, there was nothing (with a shipyard in orbit).  

I'm only playing on Normal AI at the moment, but if it's always building a shipyard first... that's just silly.  Especially when shipyards can be jointly used.

I played a game last night with Genius AI, but very limited planets to limit their current growth issues. Around turn 150 the Altarians attacked me without cause save for trading with opposing ideology and I was an opposing ideology. The Altarians actually had about 15 fleets of ships ranging from 4-11 in size. I thought I was going to be in for a fight. I only had 2 fleets with 9 ships each. I crushed all their fleets and after watching one battle it was obvious why. The fleet make up was very poor 85%+ of the fleets were all carriers with little to no attack or defense. My fleet make up was 6 small escorts (12beam/12ish all def) and 3 medium (16beam24gun/20ish all def). I never researched past the lv1 weapons or defense. I used the same fleet setup for the next 100 turns and beat any AI fleet from 3 other AIs. I am used to GalCiv2 where the AI sees my attack and changes it up. I have to change my ship designs every 10-20 turns.

Another thing I noticed was when I took over their planets I had to destroy 80%+ of their tile improvements. Almost nothing was linked and the AI likes to build the resource builds yet have them linked to nothing. I saw a Thulium data archive next to farms and even the farms were not next to each other. About the only thing that was linked was Durantium refineries, yet almost no factories linked to them.

The AI needs a good polish to ship design, fleet setup, and tile management.

  They also queue up durantium refineries right after the shipyard, despite the 30 turn build time, the minimal benefits, and the use of a limited strategic resource.

This is very true but there are also some fundementals that are still important. For example, two or three (depending on planet quality) factories next to each other and if possible next to the capital or around a nice manufacturing bonus tile should always be the first thing done. Afterward, a quick look at the planet can set which way you would build most of your buildings afterwards (Science, Manufacturing, Wealth). Just setting this in place would do wonders for the AI. After that, with all the extra buildings comes the back and forth consideration that is sometimes difficult to replicate in an AI.

Yes.. I do agree that the AI is much better than us to keep tabs on thresholds and things like that. What is is rather bad at is judging when it should change focus and turn a research world into a completely different focus and increase industry or even changing the world into a wealth/tourist world.

The problem with the AI is to stick with a certain path or when to change it.

Yes, the AI could be made excellent at the tedious micro. Then we would have to rise to its level. Would you want to do that with 50 planets? Even only 25? I can do it but its not adding to my enjoyment of the game. In multiplayer, it would be a nightmare.

I like the research choices. The ship design. Starbase building is a little tedious but not too bad.

The United Planets voting is not having any effect on my games. Star Ruler 2 is entirely better in this area.

If building up a planet was made very simple. Everything made so easy it was impossible to be sub-optimal. I don't think my game enjoyment would be any less. Planets generating bigger numbers doesn't excite me.

Being threatened by an AI's fleet of ships coming at me is exciting. This brings enjoying gameplay. Tweaking sliders and such. Again and again. Plunking down buildings in obvious patterns. These don't do much for me.