And addition to that: Allow them to roam within the support range of the station so that they can use the station as backup while also extending the fleet circle of the station in a sense
An addition to that addition: AI fleets that are allied to each other should, in general, consider that sticking to each other provides higher safety than just emergency boosting and scattering in multiple directions to escape.
So if AI fleets learn to stay in an allied station's support range for safety, they could use the same code for other situations so that we get some clumps of small fleets if they get threatened (and when the threat has passed they disperse again), or we could get a small fleet hiding behind some third party big fleet that is also their enemies enemy (something that we human players often do).
Maybe patrol fleets would be too strong if they bee-swarmed things properly... though that opens the possibility of making that kind of behavior an unlockable game mechanic (local system military commander positions to put officers or administrators or a new type of npc character into, or maybe having a fleet hq on one colony will make patrol fleets in the entire sector smart and bee-like, or maybe that behavior depends on the level and skills of the commander of each fleet).
On an entirely different note (player faction fleet composition):
I have noticed in my current campaign (stacking most of the mods I could find that are already updated for 0.9.1) I have noticed that my fleets will outright ignore my prioritized ships/weapons/fighters a lot of the time and just use something else entirely instead. And this isn't "just" the issue with the preview being inaccurate, the actual fleets themselves are also only made half of the stuff I want and half of some other equipment.
I made sure to checkmark at least one piece of equipment from each type (small/mid/large, ballistic/energy/missile weapons, frigate/destroyer/cruiser/capital, carrier/phase/warship, fighter/bomber/interceptor, etc.) and yet the fleets still very often use different stuff.
Seeing how with many mods running there is a plethora of blueprints of many vastly different visual thematics that I have learned, my fleets are now resembling something similar to what a "just hit level 60" clownsuit character back in my wow days looked like, despite me having marked lots of stuff of a unifying theme as preferred.
So, maybe the "prefer" checkmark we can set needs to be more powerful, or maybe there needs to be some way to give my faction a blacklist of blueprints that they shouldn't use at all, because deciding not to learn blueprints is a little bit of a janky solution (it still wouldn't prevent them from using stuff from the starting-set of blueprints, it wouldn't stop the undesired blueprints from showing up ove rand over again, and I can't even do that because I am completely muscle-memory'd to just immediately spam-click and learn all blueprints as soon as I acquire them).