God Emperor: in case you don't see it posted.

[jc173]

Sun Devil or anyone else correct me if I'm wrong here... but ok I went and read some other stuff in the Intergalactic Civil War thread and other places and it looks like the AI will only attack in contested systems.

The AI considers a system to be constested if it and another empire lay claim to it. An AI will claim any system it has colonized and all systems that neighbor its colonized system. So maybe the previous example is more accurate if the AI's two neighbors had 100 planets in the bordering systems each. Personally I think the way the AI claims systems is a little screwed, but I'll admit I haven't thought of a better way to do it programmingwise for general behavior. It would be nice if the AI would look for valuable planets to target that aren't immediately on the border though, criteria being large populations, ship yards -- planetary or orbital, high resource value, high resource/research/intelligence production etc. Should be possible to implement this with a recursive search algorithm and use some sort of running total giving each characterstic a value. Hmm... maybe I'll have to post something on this later.