So lately I've been playing with the 2nd beta and just completely ignoring building any offensive or defensive ships until someone decides to declare on me (all games with all ops on intelligent). Of course sooner or later someone will declare, but the problem I see is that they don't have much in the way of organization in their attacks. They might target a starbase, they might try to hunt down some freighters, or they might just diddle around with a couple of fleets.
So The question is when the AI decides to initiate a war, what kind of a goal does it have in mind? It seems entirely pointless to declare a war just to attack a couple of freighters and otherwise sit on your thumbs. What is especially annoying is that I have my planets wide open to invasion and I don't see a single troop transport (and yes the AI has had planetary invasion in all the games but one) built anywhere!
Looking at Civ4 the AI fights a couple different kinds of wars, one is the all out conquest war, the other is the minor incursion with lots of pillaging. I am wondering if the AI in GC2 kind of looks at it the same way, if it can't invade it looks for other targets, but the problem is that its really easy to defend your targets with SB upgrades which make the starbases immune to the enemy (early game anyway, but by the time I'm building my own fleets I can defend the SBs with those).
I guess it would make more sense to me if when the AI decides to initiate a war they don't just do it with what they have on hand, they make the determination that you are ripe for the picking, and then build up for the assault (like good human players will do) so that when they actually do declare they have transports ready to hit the undefended planets and adequate fleets to take down SBs.
