[Daynarr]

These are excellent observations God Emperor. Also, that is the main reason why I have Sergetti (or the Xi'Chung I am working on) design ships that have either missiles or beam weapons, but not both in the same time. The AI simply moves to the maximum range of its shortest-range weapon and tries to maintain that distance. So basically when a race has missile ships with 1 APB on them, that APB has effect of bringing that ship in range of enemy weapons where it is heavily outgunned (unless faced with the similar design). It is the worst scenario possible for AI (or human in strategic combat). Much better results are displayed by designs that have beams weapons as their primary weapon and missiles as secondary, where this design won't be outgunned by enemy ships in close range (excluding other factors like tech levels, etc.). Of course I prefer to have specialized ships that have either missiles or beams (or torpedoes), simply because they are optimized for their purpose - no unnecessary components on them, they are made either for close combat or missile combat (Xi'Chung have a long range non-missile combat ship, though).

These things can be edited by modding, and I got my hand full so far doing it. This design flaw is one of the reasons why choose to mod the original races in the first place - the original races can be much more fun if they would be more optimized overall. Most of the game text files have lots of things that are obsolete in them and hurt AI, because of the pace the new patches are coming out - it would take too much time for MM to get through them all each time they make changes in the game. This is where the modders could help - if we optimize AI text files, the overall AI would kick a$$.

Just like the Baron said, it would be very helpful if we could tell AI what proportion to use in building a selected style. Also, it would be helpful if we could tell AI to break formation as soon as enemy gets in range of their weapons, so missile ships would break formation and start missile dance, while short-range ships would close in on enemy. It would make combat against AI much harder.