It makes no sense at all for the major powers to have small numbers of ships. They're already on the small side in many cases.
It makes no sense that one ship with gear that for the most part anyone can buy can destroy them all. You said yourself that gameplay trumps realism, unless you meant that there is a gameplay reason why all the major powers (which of course, are represented in their entirety in game) need to have even more/less ships.
I don't want to fight just one enemy ship at each encounter (or even just two or three or five or any specific number, I said as much before). In fact other than viking IIs, which I have had a longstanding irrational hate for, I don't really desire any ships to have their numbers reduced. In fact, I don't think a few extra tricks up the AI's sleeve is going to make them unstoppable death machines. But if it did, as I said, I'd prefer less, but smarter ships to many, many dumb ones.
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That said, I think the AI has two major things going against it:
First is the fact that it seems like it wants to thrust too much - this becomes noticeable when it is in faster ships, pursuing you - even though you're already at top speed and they are faster than you, they keep thrusting to close the distance, basically trying to collide with you (up until they realize they are too close and flip out). This means they can only really shoot at you from directly behind you and necessarily clump up there - whereas if they knew how to coast they could come up alongside you and blast you. It's possible this is actually more of a problem in that they want to collide with you than the thrusting part.
This also comes to play in defensive scenarios, more on that in a sec.
Second is that they are bad at long range engagements, making them the most advantageous type of engagement for the player to try and use. I believe many things factor into this.
A. The fact that they don't react until they get hit (meaning not only do you get the first shot free, but the farther away you are the more shots you can get off before the first one hits).
B. They don't recognize the futility of pursuing faster ships, or of pursuing at all, since most of the time you're not really retreating but instead engaging in a parthian-esque running battle, which, again, for various reasons, they are bad at.
C. The fact that they don't take any evasive action, nor do they adjust their tactics if they aren't working (i.e. they will happily shoot at you all day while you spin in a circle and none of their shots hit)
D. Once you do hit them, they all come running at you, probably in an easily targeted clump and they don't really know when to break off - it's trivial to just keep shooting one, the others will lose interest and the one you're shooting will keep following you until he dies and you can pick them all off at your leisure this way. Which leads to
E. They don't consider each other, either in terms of position (formations, teams, don't bunch up/get too spread out), in terms of who is destroyed or anything except in reaction to the first shot.
I'm not saying all or any of these should be addressed in any way - some of it can't or shouldn't be. I just thought it might help to point out some of their shortcomings.
C. and E. may or may not be wise/possible to adjust but I think A. and B. can be improved, at least in theory. First of all, if I park a light-minute or so away from a base and let loose a storm of howitzer rounds / particle beams in their direction, it is a pretty unambiguously hostile action.
Why can't they react before they start getting hit? They don't need to flip out and follow me across the system but at least coming over to chase me off wouldn't be too extreme, would it? Even if this only happened after your shots started passing the base (i.e. you're missing the station and all the escorts, not uncommon for the first volley).
Why can they not perhaps instead, if you're bombarding them from afar, respond in kind instead of charging you? As you'll note by telling your autons/wingmen to wait, they can achieve a much higher effective rate of fire when not maneuvering (or not maneuvering much, see coasting). This makes them targets, yes but they can stop if they take a hit or take too many hits (since there often are more than you it make take a while for you to get around to shooting them all) and either run, charge you, or move to a different spot and continue shooting. (or if they are fanatical/desperate, ignore it and continue shooting - it might be in their advantage if you have an omni and you are close enough/they are slow enough to hit them no matter what)
Why can't, if you are simply attacking ships from long range with an omni weapon, they spin around in the same tight circle that you do and avoid 100% of your fire, spamming weapons in your general direction, going "nyah nyah nyah you can't hit me". Omnis are murderously accurate at close and pretty effective at mid range. Why should they be the best long range weapon, too? Or rather, why should that advantage be artificial in nature, due to the deliberate shotcomings of the AI?. (you could say that their subsequent nerf if enemies dodged at extreme range would be subject to the shortcomings of the way it auto aims, though)
Obviously they have to do something if you are hitting the station otherwise you could just destroy everything from out of range but in the case that you're not (or not doing any appreciable damage) why not just hang back?
I don't have a problem with fighting at such ranges, if you want, I just don't see why it should be a turkey shoot. smarter AI is a good way to even it up.
Side note, I see good long range weapons being ones with big areas of effect (they don't call it the kiloton because it kills a little bit) and fast moving, fast firing guns. The ones that aim themselves would be, perhaps, if they aimed themselves a little better (and this is hard since you have to guess what they are going to do), but they why even use anything else.
I don't see the fun in slowly eking away at hordes of enemies from ten times farther away than I can see. (or for that matter dealing with any sort of strategic level maneuvering, etc, as Atarlost says, getting pinned down everywhere I go, that could be fun but in a different sort of game)
If that's the 'right' way, if it truly is the case that actually approaching enemies and shooting them with your forward facing guns is 'suicidal' then I say it is a flaw in the underlying structure of the game.
