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[SonnaBanana]

In your opinion, what are things AI is good and bad at?

[goduranus]

AI is good for controlling carriers, bad at controlling ships with safety override unless you set the proper fleet aggressiveness, and absolutely terrible at controlling phase ships. Everything else it is pretty average.

[TaLaR]

Ai works best with simple, idiot-proof ships. Some examples:

Good:
As others said, carriers are the best case. Just keep yourself away, sic your fighters at something and use offensive ship system on cooldown if present. Not that AI does anything particularly smart, carriers just don't have to be as smart as other ships to be effective.

Decent:
Falcons and Eagles: good range and speed, decent firepower. Very easy to use mobility system on a short cooldown (so that using it at wrong time is not punished harshly).
Hammerhead is decent hull and AAF is straightforward buff on short cooldown.

Ok:
Conquest has same easy to use maneuvering jets system and decent base stats, but being broadside complicates things.
Paragon is nothing to write home about how AI pilots it, but being the biggest brick of stats around helps a lot anyway.

Bad:
Medusa's skimmer is very flexible system, but hard to master. Up to 3 slowly replenishing charges that need to be used at exactly right opportunities. Easy to waste for no gain and can even backfire if you phase into shots.

Very Bad:
AI phase frigates can defeat front shielded ships, but only in sterile lab conditions without fighters and missiles to distract them. In real fleet engagements they tend to faff around until they CR out. In comparison, chain deployed player piloted phase frigates can single-handedly win almost any fight, so piloting quality gap is immense here.

Horrible:
Hyperion is single worst piloted ship by AI in whole game - it's all about tricky usage of teleport system, which AI is absolutely incapable of.

[Plantissue]

The Ai isn't that bad at controlling phase ships and Hyperion. If they manage to find themselves accidently isolating the opponent ship, they do go round the rear and shoot at it. It's just that they are too conservative and don't have any real way to know whether it is entirely safe to do so or not.

[Megas]

Doom is also rather forgiving to use.

[TaLaR]

The Ai isn't that bad at controlling phase ships and Hyperion. If they manage to find themselves accidently isolating the opponent ship, they do go round the rear and shoot at it. It's just that they are too conservative and don't have any real way to know whether it is entirely safe to do so or not.

Player-piloted Hyperion can trivially bypass omni-shields and is pretty much invulnerable as long as CR lasts. The only reasons it's not very good in the end are extremely short CR time and limited dps - it just doesn't do enough until it runs out of CR, compared to Afflictor.

AI-piloted Hyperion may occasionally get behind a front shielded enemy... Just doesn't come anywhere close to it's potential.

[sotanaht]

The Ai isn't that bad at controlling phase ships and Hyperion. If they manage to find themselves accidently isolating the opponent ship, they do go round the rear and shoot at it. It's just that they are too conservative and don't have any real way to know whether it is entirely safe to do so or not.

What are you talking about?  The AI is absolutely abysmal at controlling either of those.  A Hyperion given to the AI will die in record time, and phase ships get so distracted by missiles they don't do anything at all.  Check out the videos in this thread to see how bad Phase Ship AI is http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=16676.msg264558#msg264558

[Plantissue]

AI Phase ships do fine as long as you don't give them all missiles. If it was 2 Light Assault Guns and 2 Atropos or similar it would had done perfectly fine, destroying the Eagle with ease. It had no problem finding and sticking to the rear of the Eagle.

Phase ships do seem reluctant to fire with explosive missiles, possibly because it can't tell where the missile will land on the armour or shield, or it thinks it will be caught in the blast. (As a side note, when a capital explodes, the explosion is obscenely huge; beyond antimatter blaster range. Normally it doesn't matter since if a shield is up the explosion does nothing to shields, but phase ships have no shields.)

[goduranus]

If you are uber pro, you can enter cloak before the AMB projectile hits the capital though, helps if you don't get that skill that makes projectiles faster.

[Shad]

The AI is in general very good at flicking shields on/off to maximise damage absorbtion. It also avoids being overloaded quite well.

On the downside it's not quite aggressive enough in key situations and will fall back when a small push could finish off the enemy ship.

[TaLaR]

If you are uber pro, you can enter cloak before the AMB projectile hits the capital though, helps if you don't get that skill that makes projectiles faster.

Only works against front shields. To bypass omni shield you need cloak's speed boost, so you must shoot on unphase.

To kill omni-shielded capital safely you need to fire at farthest from center corner of target ship (front or rear of Conquest, but never it's sides/rear ears of Paragon/etc), from max range and on a get-away course as you unphase. Even then it's razor-thin margin.

[Igncom1]

The AI is very good at flicking shields on and off to avoid damage.

The AI is very good at flicking shields on and off to take damage.

The AI giveth and the AI taketh away.

[Plantissue]

rear ears of Paragon

Can't unsee. Thanks.

[Modo44]

In my experience, phase skimmers are awesome for the AI. While it will waste initial charges on going in, it is very good at jumping in and out of an existing fight (something it likes to try anyway, even with slower ships). If your Medusa or Wolf dies a lot, you have not given it a good shield setup. Those are high-tech shields, meaning they really can not armor tank, and should never be required to.

Even more general, the AI can use most ships as long as they are overbuilt in terms of defense. If you drop caps and vents, give it upgraded armor (combined with a specialist officer). You can only skip both on dedicated carriers.

[TheDTYP]

I thought the A.I. was good at piloting the Hammerhead. Then in a huge one-sided battle, the A.I. thought it would be a good idea to take one of my hammerheads to the edge of the map despite orders to stay and defend a control point, where it got surrounded and quickly wiped out by a huge number of pirates.

This happened two more times. I was furious.