The AI war minister is the part of the AI that decides on objectives during war. As in, chase a fleet, occupy a planet, take a bordering system, defend a border system, etc.

While tweaking the weight of those objectives does improve the AI behaviour during war, it does not fix the underlying problem, which is the absolute lack of a brain the war minister has.

To give the war minister a brain, I will need to teach it the following things:

-The closest fleet to an objective should always be assigned to that objective
-Border systems are the most important thing to park your defensive fleets in
-No need to defend border systems with an empire that is not at war with you
-Some systems are not worth defending
-Actually assigning fleets on defensive missions (for some reason only offensive objectives are considered)

Now that I have looked into this I finally understand why the AI is so horrible at waging war. What the AI does is merely putting a value on certain objectives and the only thing they ever consider when evaluating an objective is how much fleet power is required to fulfill it.

No thought about how far that system is away. No thought about if that system is even connected to your empire. No thought about whether or not there are closer fleets to assign to that objective.