Ministers

[Baron Munchausen]

Which ministers are you using? For many functions you have to explicitly hand control of the ship/colony over to the AI. Select it and click the 'mask' button to enable the minister to control it. Then you have to have the right minister turne don in the minsiters screen under empire options, of course.

[Gandalph]

For the colonization minister, I turn on the "Automatic Minsister for new vehicles" when building colony ships and turn it back off when building warships, although if you do not have the attack, defense, explore, or patrol ministers on, the AI will not do anything with a warship, even when it has the minister icon.