AI needs to be MUCH more aggressive

[jc173]

The AI is pretty bad at making long term strategic military decisions a lot of the time. Right now it mostly attacks planets only if they are in a contested system. I've seen the AI use DN's with quantum reactors as scouts that travel through most of my empire without attacking a single colony. On the other hand I have seen it attack ships/fleets in non-contested systems. I suggested a fix to the forum using a point system to give enemy planets a value for being attacked or captured within 3 or 4 warps of the border using a recursive search. The AI could just total up the points based on different characteristics such as the planet's size, breathable/non-breathable atmosphere, resource value, and any important facilities. Then it would just pick out what it considered to be the most important target and go off and attack.

The algorithm itself shouldn't be difficult it's just add up values and sort for the largest although you would probably want to randomize that somewhat so it wasn't too predictable. The hitch is that the AI would need to perform reconaissance or intel missions and then remember that data. Hopefully it isn't so complicated that Aaron can't add in something like this in a future patch.