[Raapys]

How about moving more of the total research points spent from weapons into applied? Would both help alot with getting the AI to increase ship sizes faster, and prevent him from wasting too much research points in regular weapons that he wont be using. There's obviously something going a bit wrong when the AI end up with Level 6 or 9( that's alot of research points) in regular missiles and weapons, when he's only using racial based ones.

Perhaps remove regular armor and weapons completely from the GlobalResearch file and instead add the desired weapons and armor to each empire's setup file, to ensure they research and use what they should be.

I think tight focus on a specific strategy will be the key to having the AI perform better, instead of having a general 'spread out' strategy for all AIs where they all basically just build the same mix of ships and units and use the same play styles.

I mean, we'd all love if we could get the AI to use all the neat weapons, make perfect fleet combinations with fighters, drones, attack ships, etc., but I really think it has to be easy and relatively straight-forward if we're gonna get anywhere near acceptable performance.

I also think, based on the non-existing ability the AI has to defend itself, that attacking has to be the AIs way of defending. Let's face it; the tiny amount of fighters that the AI keeps to protect his colonies aren't gonna stop any fleet determined to attack it; they need a real fleet for that. And where is that real fleet? It's usually in a system on the other side of the galaxy, flying around doing nothing and leaving their colonies free for the taking, unfortunately.

By the way, could you bring in the latest AI files(0.98) to the page?