Essentially I'm making this post so as not to interfere with the SoA2 thread
Now, just to keep this on the right track, so it doesn't look like i'm picking on Major Stress for some reason, my experience with the AI is different than Major Stress, and I can probably assume other modders have different experiences with it as well. This thread is for discussion and conglomeration of what we know (for future use in the Wiki obviously), but from said thread:
StatCountTypes that are "must haves" for your AI to work. Scout, Colony, CapitalShipUtility0 (colony capital). That is the bare minimum I am aware of to get your AI to build. Of course you will need your research stations as well.
This is pure speculation. For your AI to fully function you will need every statcounttype in the game. Which means you MUST mimic a vanilla sins faction as far as ststcounttypes. It doesnt matter which faction you mimic. The roletype can be something different with the exceptions of the three i listed. If you cant colonize your AI wont build. If you cant scout your AI wont build. I would include "siege" in the list as well because if you cant bomb you cant colonize. I say this because of the past issues we had with the AI in SoA 2. Making sure we had every statcounttype seems to have fixed the problem.
The requirement for Scout, and Colony, my experience agrees with, but I would contest the requirement for CapitalShipUtility0, in that our AI works without it (Scouts, builds, Conquers the universe etc), in fact we only use the Battleship and Carrier statcounttypes for Capitals. Research Stations are more of a research screen requirement than an AI one (with it crashing if you don't have both of them assigned)
We also basically only use the Light,Lrm\LongRange,and Heavy roleTypes\statCountTypes, So in my mind there is no need to fully mimic a Sins race.
Now to add some more observations to the pot:
I have discovered recently that, Note: this is using a set up where planets belong by default to a militia race, the AI Almost requires Militia ships around planets, in that if you remove militia ships the AI will, about 50% of the time, just happily ignore nearby planets, I think the start of some of the conquer\colonise AI routines involves clearing out the militia ships, and without them there it just does nothing.
The AI also seems to have built in limitations for SlotCount, in that even with available slots set to 20,000 i've never seen it use more than about 1,800.
