Additional AI Level

Does anyone else feel this way?

No, not really.

Also, making a "competitive" difficulty level is an extremely high challenge in terms of programming the AI behavior, and balancing it against a very diverse playerbase.

Well actually, it wouldnt

Give them a large boost in Resources at the start, or throughout.

Put timers on attacks?

Set aggresive levels.

Wouldnt take that long especially when theres already levels out there.

This. The problem is, a lot of the decisions we make are easy for us. We sort of see everything at once, we can just say "oh I'll stay a little longer to destroy this capital, then I'll retreat" or whatever, but when you're trying to code it it doesn't work that way. Everything the AI does has to be calculated and quantified. In the above situation, the AI would have to query the strength of its own fleet, enemy's fleet, then check the current hp of every enemy capital, figure out the estimated time it'd take to destroy it (if you want to make it really smart, it'd also have to look at the number of enemy support ships able to repair it), do some number crunching to see how long it can stay before it loses its most damaged capital and if it's enough time to nuke the enemy's.... and it just piles on from there.

Whereas a human can just glance at any given situation and absorb all the info, the AI has to constantly keep track of it, which often means re-doing the same calculation every so often. The more of these things you have, the more bogged down the CPU becomes until the only thing it can do is run the AI calculations

I don't think the CPU utilization issue is necessarily a huge one, since some of the AI's most blatantly horrible decisions are simple ones like not retreating a capital ship, or bringing a capital ship with 500 hp back into the battle.  The problem isn't that the CPU needs to analyze the situation more to make the right decision, it's just clearly making horrible decisions.  Don't get me started on the AI that ignores 100 strike craft squads ripping its fleet apart while just passing through a gravity well, losing its fleet again and again as it passes through the same ambush <_<

I think there's a lot of room for AI improvement, even if it's only tweaking the way the AI prioritizes its tech progression (right now it progresses way too slowly, and in many cases is still spamming LF's when I've got a balanced army of LRF's, carriers, and support cruisers).  Is it so much to ask, also, that the AI be able to detect that its units are under attack and order them to respond accordingly rather than walk along to their destination happily as if nothing was happening?

Oh don't get me wrong, I wasn't saying there's no room for improvement.. just that some of these things sound easier than they are to do.

However they did say in one of the early post-release interviews that CPU was a big limiter for their AI.

I know what you are talking about, though I never personally have had the AI leave a capitalship at a world and retreat the rest of the fleet but it does annoy me when the AI will run despite having greater numbers, and you literally cannot battle the AI without pushing them back to their homeworld, even then you have oodles of time to build a stronger fleet, or a superweapon to wipe them out with.

It would be nice if the AI had a more intelligent means of deciding if the risk of staying in battle is worth it. Or even to retreet the units as they near death but keep the units that are full health.

It would be nice to be able to have a ballanced AI option. Also, being able to choose the AI's tactics like LRM spam, Homeworld Rush, Carrier Spam, Ballanced Fleet or just random. That would be useful if there was a certain strategy that always gets you online and you could practace it against the AI.

To go the extreme, they could have one of those 5 point stat charts that look like a pentagon, you know what I mean? With the stuff in the middle and the corners of the inside pentagon go to the corners that represent the stat and if your ballanced then it looks like a pentigon inside a pentigon but if you beefed up a stat it has like a huge spike on one corner, and if you are really bad in a stat it goes like a big dent in another corner, I wish I knew what it was called so I didn't have to type this but you know what I mean right? And you could fine tune the AIs' stats like: Economic, Reaserching, Agressive, Defencive, and.... well i don't have a fifth beacuse therre are only 4 Ai types in game, but that would be the coolest! I admit, that sounds hard for the devs to do, but it could be included in the next expansion or something.

It's a bit off topic but it's the best way to improve the AI, and it would be really cool, heck people might actually use the AI online if they implemented this, but it's just me, imposeing my own ideas, do it or else!  LOL

The couple of times that I've seen the sacrifice issue was simple. The system was not the AI's homeworld, I had 4 capital ships (doing an achievement or teaching friends how to play) and the AI had a single cap with less than 10 frigates (skirmishers in the most recent example). The frigates did not run until the cap ship was destroyed. I have also seen the converse where a large number of frigates ran when staying could have really hurt my defenses. So I see both sides of the issue and would appreciate a better more intelligent AI.

Another example of potentially better AI play is setting defenses within their owned systems. I rarely see repair platforms and the weapons platforms seem scattered and non-supporting in terms of field of fire. There are tons of posts here that talk about overlapping repair platforms and locating defense platforms with 1-2 hanger bays to buy time for reinforcements to arrive. Yet even that kind of deterministic coding is missing.

I'm a long time Stardock player and all of the GalCiv games had some really nice AI and I didn't have to wait even seconds for each AI player to complete their entire turn to decide and make strategic decisions.

That's partly because they do a lot of calculations during your turn.

I know, however I'm also not asking for the intelligence of a grandmaster chess game. Also there is a lot that can be done in a background worker thread (not read as multicore) that can aid in the continual evaluation of combat situations as they occur.

Just so everyone knows I really like this game and see playing it for a long time to come regardless of these kind of changes. I've even purchased entrenchment even though I'm unlikely to install it, because I want to assist in supporting the company and continued evolution of this game. I've just about dropped all of my other games in favor of this one so I can get in 20+ hours/week.