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[Phenice]

In Safety Override ships, the AI will bring a large enemy down to near death, then it will frustratingly refuse to fire the kill shot, because it's afraid of the explosion from the enemy ship.

Consequently, the Safety Override ship will dance around the near-dead, larger ship until the larger ship kills it. So much for staying safe.

To fix this, when a ship lacks the weapon range to safely kill an enemy ship from a distance, and when "Full Assault" is ordered or when a pilot is Aggressive, the AI should fire the kill shot, even though it will take some damage. It's the sensible decision for an Aggressive pilot, or for a pilot who's been ordered to go hog-wild.

[Network Pesci]

In previous versions, the AI was too aggressive.  I vividly remember the times I ragequit because I once again made the mistake of thinking I could trust the AI with the only Tempest I'd ever seen in a campaign, only to have it take the killshot on a pirate Dominator from point-blank range.  This issue is fixed (AI is not suicidal and Tempests are as common as soda cans now), but it feels like the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction.  I saw a similar issue to what you're talking about earlier today although it wasn't a SO ship.  I also see a similar issue all the time if I manually pursue fleeing craft.  Pursuit frigates are so afraid of the death explosion they'll let fast but relatively helpless ships get away when they could easily destroy them with no risk.

I'm not one of the code wizards on this forum so I don't understand exactly how the AI works at all times but it seems the problem is it only looks at the next thing that will happen, not the thing after that.  I see a lot of complaints about "Cowardly AI" since this recent version came out, (I'm not saying I agree with them but they're there) and I think it would resolve a lot of problems if the AI could learn, "yes I'm in danger right this instant but I can tank the danger on my shields and vent in a couple of seconds when the danger is gone".

[Delta_of_Isaire]

To be fair, I am still seeing Tempests (without SO) occasionally getting killed by death explosions. I blame it on the AI either recklessly dropping its shields, or running its (soft) flux up so high that its shields can't take any real damage anymore.

Honestly, death explosions aren't a huge threat to a ship with shields up, so an SO ship ought to aggressively close the gap.

The real problem is that the AI - particularly aggressive AI - lets its flux go up too high before considering retreat to dissipate/vent. Which leads to shields being dropped in the face of enemy fire, or overloads, etc. Case in point: my aggressive Hammerhead decided to 1v1 a pirate Eradicator (both with lvl 5 officers) and ended up taking a good chunk of hull damage. Which would have been more if I hadn't ordered it to retreat.

[TaLaR]

Shielded ships with some flux reserve to spare and no other immediate threats around shouldn't worry too much. Worst case they kill the target and eat an overload.

For unshielded ships with short range weapons it's more difficult. They need to do the finishing shot while on a breakaway trajectory, and in more extreme cases pick correct angle to attack from (explosions are circular, but ships themselves are not, and for some ships explosions do NOT originate from visual center of the ship). Anyway, that's what I do as player, and AI doesn't.