And... allowing obvious abusive game mechanics that can easily be changed to make the AI more competitive seem like an odd choice to me. Why allow players to use a feature to make it easy and then let the AI cheat by knowing where all the good planets are on higher difficulties to compensate. This does not make any sense to me what so ever.
If you play the game with no abuse of game mechanics the AI actually are a pretty decent opponent. You can still beat Normal fairly easy but harder difficulties really becomes hard. Abusing stacking to the extremes and slider terror tactics will just make the game easy and tedious. What is the real achievement of this in the first place?
At which type of players are you trying to create the AI, you can never adhere to both player groups at the same time without major effort into how the AI work in different settings. If you allow the AI to really use the game mechanics then players will have to adapt and they will start complaining about the game being an accountants micromanagement nightmare.
I have no problem if sensor are really powerful later in the game, but being able to get 25-30 range from the start are just silly and completely unbalanced and invalidates any early scouting and make finding both planets and goodie huts way too easy.