[Phoenix-D]

Very carefully. The tech areas are (early names, trying to find shorter ones):
Starship Construction
Escort Class Construction
Advanced Escort Class Construction
Crusier Class Ship Construction
Advanced Cruiser Class Construction
Capital Ship Construction
Advanced Capital Ship Construction

So for each AI, I have to decide what type of ship they are going to focus on. The goal here is to make using small ships a viable option instead of the rush for capital ships that is normal SE4. "Starship construction" is like normal SE4, but cheaper, and the ships are of lower quality (very slow, easy to hit, maintance increases). An AI using just that would have to rely on "rush" tactics, and would be woefully outclassed one-on-one.

Complicating things is the advanced level of ship construction. That doesn't just give hulls- it gives special bridges, components like maintance reducers or weapons, and what I'm calling "specialization modules".

Each of those has an auxiliary control ability, so you can only mount one, and they give bonuses. So for example you can either have a combined LR sensor, combat sensor bonus, and slight speed increase or a full-spectrum cloak, ECM increase, and minor minesweeping ability. I haven't gone into getting the AI to use them..

The simplest way to get a SE4 Ai running, now that I think of it, would be to make them research escorts then cruisers then capital ships then advanced capital ships.. that's the most similar to what standard SE4 does. Dunno how hard that would be to program though.

Phoenix-D