i have them all set to aggressive, none of them are on random, all of them are on same team and locked there, fleets are on as big as they can go, im currently playing a game against nine very hard ai, all of them allied, i grabbed a planet and built a ton of defenses on it and now none of them approach it ever, ill post a screenshot for you to see
the multistar approach dosent seem to work too well, once you find yourself a planet inside the new system you can just park there, build up a defense fleet and spam factorys, put a culture/meteor base there and nothing will kill it, not that they would ever jump to the grav well anyways
i agree fully that the ai should have a better understanding of combined fleets, that would definatly go a very long way in making them work better



green was the only one that tryed to attack me in several hours of play, and they lost terribly... and never attacked again... i dont have a good screenshot, but both the planets next to this one have 2-3 full scale fleets in them
i can understand at some point the ai may be programmed to wait for you to make the first move, which is fine i guess, but it makes for extremely boring gameplay.
i was going to use these screenshots to make an action report, about a valiant defense against overwhelming odds, i guess ill have to postpone that for another patch
just for the record, this "feat" was accomplished without even a 9% upkeep