I've been beta-ing the pre-patch stuff for a few weeks. The Cue Cappa *regularly* send in fleets of 20+ ships, as do the Eee Consortium.
And when I saw a single Eee DN hanging out by itself I thought I'd be trick and hit it with a fleet of 18 pretty high tech DSs. 2 of my DSs escaped, 16 died, and I didn't even get through it's shields.
I think the AI is doing pretty well these days, though I purposefully hamper myself by NOT allowing tactical combat. After all, it IS a strategic game.
In my current game I've seen plenty of large AI fleets. Too bad they were mostly Cue Cappa. I had a nice time using a single ship captured via Crew Insurrection to capture the two front ships in the fleet, then use the Alleigence Converters on them to convert the next two closest ships, then used those to capture... on and on. I had a single captured dreadnaught capture a fleet of 20 dreadnaughts. That is sad
Other than that, the AI has been kinda sorta ok with sending fleets at me (still can't seem to figure out how to send large fleets through a warp point to kill my lone fighter group there... but that was over 50 turns ago
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