Heya, guys
This is a rather complex issue, I fear. I mean, it's easy to underestimate the complexity of the decision-making process that we, as human players, go through in playing SE4.
I'm not really much of a programmer, so I hesitate to criticize Aaron too much on this.
On the one hand, one can look at the Q3 bots, and the incredibly complex fuzzy logic they use to make their fighting decisions. And one can look at the AI in Homeworld, and that seems to behave pretty intelligently.
On the other hand, those games do not really involve the same complexities of long-range planning; both are essentially tactical situations only.
But the gripping hand is, the SE4 AI
does work, if not always quite as well as we might wish it would
Just as Aaron never stopped supporting and improving SE3, I think we can confidently expect him to keep refining SE4 for a long time to come.