Generally speaking I think the way the AI builds up to and wages war is pretty good, and is much better than Glavius. They make a very large fleet early on which is quite dangerous, but I noticed that once you hit mid game, they lose the ability to manage their colonies.

I took a look at the AIs in my latest game. They are all constantly in the red for energy : https://i.imgur.com/SjBhnVx.jpg

They build large fleets, spam anchorages and spam foundries/labs without caring if their economy can sustain the upkeep. Their fleet power constantly gets hit by penalties for going bankrupt. This is OK at early game if they are going to rush someone, but it doesnt work long term without top tier difficulty bonuses because any player will easily out grow the AI and the AI doesn't recognize that the fleets are getting hit by penalties for going bankrupt.

The AI had almost every generator district on every planet built, but it still wasn't enough. From what I saw, the problems were :

- The AI had an excess of minerals/food but was still maxed out on mining/food districts...it should have built less of those.

- No attempt to specialize planets in terms of resource production, the AI just tried to max out every district on every planet.

- The AI doesnt build buildings like energy grids, mining purification planets, etc to boost resource production, it just spams alloys/research labs.

- The AI makes no attempt to build refineries or upgrade buildings...so it gets hit by massive building upkeep when players are upgrading buildings and becoming more efficient.

- The AI doesn't check to see if it can afford ship upkeep, it just keeps building more, nor does it upgrade ships to become more capacity efficient. It just keeps trying to spam more ships but doesn't upgrade them which just causes it to go bankrupt.

In general, the way the AI plays is very "power gamey", it's all optimized for rushing a player, it doesn't behave like a real empire would. It pretty much ignores all other aspects of empire building to spam research labs and alloys for war mongering. It's like the USSR on crack. This results in very predictive play.

All AIs use the exact same ship designs because they bee line for the same weapons. Most of the ship designs are heavily biased towards shields and anti-armor weapons like plasma cannons and neutron launchers. They don't use strike craft or PD. Since every AI uses the same designs, I don't need to scout or vary my designs at all, I can use the same design to counter every AI in the game with the exception of FEs.

They never bother to fortify chokepoints either, it's all about ship spamming. With Glavius, the AI is smart enough to actually fortify a choke point on their border and will build defense platforms to make taking key systems harder. Once you deal with the initial wave (that usually suicides into your bastion), you can just walk across the border and take systems/planets because theres nothing to slow you down, no bastions or fortified planets, then you can just sit and wait for the next wave.

The AI doesn't build strongholds either, so the player never has to invest in assault armies, assault army tech or orbital bombardment...just 10 assault armies are enough to take pretty much every non-FE planet in the game, because they only have the bare minimum of defence armies. Looking at an AI capital now, and it only has 4 defence armies in 2312. Glavius does build strongholds, mid game planets generally have 900+ defence strength and I have seen 1.6k+ defence strength planets before.

The AI also seems to ignore ascencion paths in favor of mostly war mongering perks.

With Starnet, games feel very similar, since the AI does exactly the same thing each time, and uses the exact same ships each time. Whole elements of the game like ground combat are rendered trivial because the AI doesnt bother to defend planets on the ground.