Idea for MM to improve AI's strategy

[Barnacle Bill]

Good idea!

While they are at it, though, they need to fix the "piecemeal attack" method the AI uses. Example - in my most recent game I played a very non-expansive method concentrating on internal development rather than exploration/expansion. The Sallega found me pretty early and keep sending single ships to attack planets heavily defended by weapon platforms. They started out with sending single escorts to my homeworld. They worked up through the sizes to sending light cruisers. When I started building orbital stuff at the homeworld and colonizing other planets in system, they switched targets to the colonies w/o any ships & bases. However, I've been landing WP's on the turn of colonization So far, every ship they send has been swatted without causing any damage. Had they every waited 10-20 turns and collected the ships into a single fleet, instead of sending one ship every 2-3 turns, it would have been a different story.

In the MOO games, when the AI decided to attack a system, it would assemble what it thought was a good-sized strike fleet in a nearby system before launching the attack. Sure, you could disrupt it by a pre-emptive strike on the assembly site, but it was still a lot more effective than SE4. I'd like to see the SE4 AI select targets as prosed in this thread, but then assemble a reasonable strike fleet based on its recon of the target before launching the attack.