Less ships with better crews makes a huge difference--dont put your entire armada on the field and you'll see the difference... that is unless you've captured so many goddamn lashers you can afford to send wave after wave of them crewed by expendable greenies.
The crew rank affects turn speed, shields, accuracy, etc, not their underlying decision making. A small fleet of the most expensive frigates/destroyers with elite/advanced crews, behave exactly as regulars do in random battle. The save I was just playing had 1 elite Hyperion, 2 elite tempests, 1 veteran tempest, Sunder, and Hammerhead. I can baby them through the fight against the Tritach armada by leashing the destroyers to me or an objective (otherwise they faceplant into a dozen cruisers and vaporize), up until the Paragon, where I need their antishield weaponry. It's almost as if the AI uses only the center pixel of an opponent's hitbox to determine their distance, could probably explain the faceplanting against larger units. Even so, it makes me wonder why ships armed with 1250 range weapons want to run into things so badly.
Also, collision damage is pretty minor - if your Hyperion has its shields up it shouldn't really notice that much...
Collisions are fatal for the Hyperion.
A Hyperion isn't going to have shields when it's flying straight into an Onslaught or Paragon. It's going to blow its flux load coming in, all while taking streams of repeaters, concentrated lasers, and heavy blasts to its face. Most of my reloads come from its elite crew deciding that soloing capships by ramming into its engines while overloaded is somehow the greatest thing ever.
I don't play the random missions very much at all - the fleets they give you are usually terrible messes.
Maybe its just my choice of ships.
I designed my fleet around the power of frigates and bombers
Well there you have it. I like to experiment with everything. Random battle gives me a taste of all types of units, with a mix of weaponry, at times forcing me to deal with vastly superior forces and coming up with new tactics on the fly. In the campaign, I choose the ship and loadout I want, and try to make it work. I'm forced to come up with a different strategy every game, and that keeps things fresh.
Everyone knows the power of mass concentrations of bombers/fighter fleets right now. I'm at the point where I skip a random battle if the game decides to throw me multiple wings, even going up against several cap ships. The enemy AI is really unequipped to deal with it, since it has no strategic cohesion, and especially since PD can't make up its mind when targeting a swarm of gnats. There's no way for it to intercept something without it going crazy and pulling a capping unit from across the map. Mostly all the AI wants to do is run from one end of the map to other, and has no overall battle awareness whatsoever. It also loves to retreat if you so much as sneeze at it.
What I'm trying to say is, all units wish they were bombers, too. The AI for fighter class units behaves as it should in a massive swarm, that's why it's effective for you, and you don't see the problem. Things are dead before they ever have the chance to collide. Everything else behaving the same way makes me facepalm. Play some of the drawn out random battles where it pits multiple capships, ones where it doesn't throw you a bunch of fighter-class/tempests for free wins. Usually it's like watching a bunch of linemen, where their only goal is to ram into each other, as hard as possible.
