Basically, when I'm testing my latest AIs in the Sim, the AIs attached to ships generated by the Sim fleet operate just fine, but when I take my tested ship and put it onto AI behavior, I often have to put it onto AI control more than once to get it to behave as expected.
It also suddenly seems to lose the target and just wanders around at random times. It's almost like it can sense the other ships that haven't spawned, or something else is interfering with its operation, or the Vanilla AI is running at the same time as my AI, and they are giving contradictory steering orders, resulting in bad behavior.
In battles, the AI is working just fine... I think. It's certainly killing me very well now, lol.