What is the ai thinking?

The AI could have beaten me to two high quality planets , but their colony ships took the scenic route and I nabbed them both. (Only by one tile, but that's as good as a mile.)

The AI does NOT get smarter on higher difficulties. They just get more cheats. One of my biggest complaints with this game--and I have very few--is that the AI is terrible. I guess to be fair, this is the case in most games (bad AI and higher difficulties just mean more cheats).

Were you fighting... the Minbari?

Sometimes the AI skips everything, sometimes it destroys my shipyards and starbases. This is the most intriguing part of it, because it's not that such a possibility hasn't been coded into it. 

I play normal, and the airport invades my planets. Go figure.

Yes, planets always get invaded, but starbases and shipyards is a random story.

On the one hand, I think it's realistic that the AI will sometimes kill everything, sometimes forget to kill everything (Have you ever played a multiplayer game where you've stuffed something up in a situation you've been in before and thought "Dang! Last time I did the right thing!" and had to deal with the error you made? Same thing.) On the other, it's pointless leaving those things alive because the race that's been attacked can't A: Build and populate a Transport or Invade ship to populate/invade a planet or B: Build enough of a war fleet to get back into the game because there's no planet to sponsor the surviving shipard or populate the Transport/Invade ship.

On balance: The AI should be told to Kill. Every. Damn. Thing. Leave realistic stupid AI decisions to something less obvious: not growing populations so well, etc etc.

Thanks for the feedback guys. We're doing some work on GalCiv 3 now so all of this is important to us.

How about an AI fleet defending a planet, pop out destroy my force that I am building to attack planet.  Nope, waits for to bring enough ships to destroy defense fleet.

I tend to agree.  Given surrenders, if you leave starbases there, they will belong to another race soon and they will bite you in the ass, eventually, when another player uses them to extend its range.

I guess it'd be a good idea. Often it doesn't even attack my ships which are far weaker than his fleet passing by. 

I remember once I played as Terrans. All enemies were set to normal difficulty with one exception - the Dreghis who were set to genius or incredible. Surely they went to war with everyone and started swallowing the galaxy like the Golden Horde, but they sat at the opposite corner so I could build up.

At some point Altarians surrendered their resources to me. They were next to dreghis, but it'd take 20-30 rounds at least for me to start bringing first ships there. So I used a starbase which at that point still provided some protection. I rushed a shipyard, build a ship with legions and stationed it at that starbase. I started building military ships.

At the worst moment I had just two planets in this corner and I needed to recapture them every few rounds with this legion ship and a few battle ships I built.

What's the problem: while passing by they never touched the shipyard. 

One thing that I think I've noticed that the AI wants to do is to find and target your unique ships that you get from different governments. I mean the prime minister's ship, the princess, the prince etc. It also seems to magically know where they are.