Why the AI builds the Ships it does

[Atraikius]

I think it may be more than just that. I've seen one of my AI's building a combat support ship I had put in its design file over its normal attack ship - when I tried to figure out why, the only thing that I could come up with was that the AI must evaluate the designs against each other in a solo duel using the ship strategies - thus it chose to build a fleet tender (attack ship with repair, and 1 cap missile 3 - maximum/dont get hurt) over the normal attack ship (2 plasma 1, 2 DUC3, optimal/short) because the tender would be able to beat down the attack ship at the long ranges.

As a related question - has anyone else noticed that the AI will occasionally loose it and start designing ships with 1 primary weapon, 1 secondary weapon, additional abbilities, and then fill up on the primary weapon regardless of how many primary and secondary weapons it is suppose to place on the design?