Last time I played this game (I have all three) which was quite a while ago, the AI only made weapons on its ships. This meant that I could either beat the AI at its own game by spamming cheap ships with the minimum of weaponry needed to destroy its ships since it had 0 defensive upgrades (which I didn't because I always ended up both territorially smaller and militarily non-existant compared to the AI), get destroyed by it because I was producing much more expensive, larger ships with balanced offense & defense or steamroll it by producing large ships with some weaponry and stacked defenses that made my ships' ability to destroy their fleets restricted only by the horrible pathfinding making my ships chase the same targets and how much I felt like manually directing them.

Has this been fixed as of now? I don't know what caused it nor when it started happening. Haven't played this game for a long time because of this issue which broke the spirit of the game.