I know that, but IMO the correct solution would've been to give the player incentive to not solo rather than to punish them for it. As for AI, the simplest and best way to stop it from kiting would be to, y'know, stop it from kiting. The dev can't control the player's behavior, at least not directly, but he can directly control the AI's behavior. Programming the AI to kite and then introducing CR to 'solve' that problem seems... unwise, to say the least.
Making AI suicidal for no tactical gain would, on the other hand, negatively impact players who don't rely extensively on the flagship for doing damage.
Now the player barely matters
I guess Remnants barely matter as well.It's not very exciting, no, but I didn't have anyone to herd the Remnants for me. Friendly ships can't win battles for me, if there are no friendly ships.
Funnily enough, smashing stations with a single ship (Paragon in that case), on the other hand, is actually fairly quick and cost effective, if you take enough combat skills.
That's a good thing, though. The AI ultimately exists to be defeated by the player, so giving the player effective strategies to do so is good for the game. Ever play Dark Souls?
I have not. If you want to run past your enemies, run past them in campaign. You don't have to fight them then. Campaign is a part of the game as well.
In addition to that, Starsector is ill-suited to giving the player too much power, because a) there are few enemies suited to taking a single, powerful and fast enemy (and, apparently, AI cannot be easily adapted to fighting a single or a few powerful ships without making it overly reckless in other situations), b) the player has infinite amount of flux available to negate infinite amount of damage, which doesn't really work well for fighting many inferior enemies.
If you put enemies on equal footing with the player and make them able to handle everything well, the only thing you create is frustration and boredom.
That's... The point of how AI fights in Starsector. You have fleets on both sides. Would making your fleet too dumb to live be worth making the enemy fleet too dumb to live as well? Then you might as well not have a fleet at all, just like in many other space games.