A)It seems that the AI always uses the same moves in tactical combat, send the whole fleet to capture points, then assault the center of the player's fleet. I think it would be cool if there were some varieties to the AI's opening moves, doesn't have to be too many, and can be randomly selected from a set of pre-programmed moves, rather than dynamically reacting to the player's own moves.
I would like to suggest some examples:
1. Advance through the center of the map with defend order, wait 3 minutes, then cancel defend order to make fleet spread out;
2. Advance through both sides of the map with defend orders, the cancel the orders to pull the fleet to the center to try to catch the player in a pincer;
3. Advance through either left or right side of the map, to try to make an asymmetric battleline
B) Also, to deal with the problem of front line ships getting thinned out while reinforcements are trickling in, I think large AI fleets that have ships in reserve should try to move the deployed ships back toward its own spawn point as it takes losses, so that reinforcements take less time to get to the front line. Right now, it is very easy for the player to defend near their own spawn point, thus enjoying an easy retreat as well as causing the AI enemy to be destroyed singly as it trickles it.
C) Finally, this may be a bit iffy, but maybe the AI should have battleships lead the charge, instead of frigate screen first? Right now the AI seems to deploy small ships first, then reinforce with big ships as the small ships get destroyed. But small ships die fast, so the result is that battleships and cruisers end up trickling into the battle without support. But battleships and cruisers are often also very slow, so by the time they get to the battle, many of the smaller ships on the front line would have died. I propose that AI deploy large ships first, then the smaller ones. The result would be that the firepower on the front lines would decrease less quickly, since bigger ships are more resilient, as well as that gaps in firepower are filled more quickly, since smaller ships are usually faster and take less time to reach the battle. Finally, large ships first would mean that CR on the whole fleet used up at around the same time, whereas small ships first would mean that any small ships would run out of CR, while the big ships will have lots of CR remaining, but would be less effective since they have no effective escort.