Deveyus

There is an option in terms of keeping the universe alive without loading a ton of sectors, and that's simply to load some approximation arrays for each sector that give you an idea of what is in there, and have them take 'faction turns' every so often (how often will depend on what you want them doing and of course would be variable) but should allow you to simulate the most basic things, like an entire universe of factories, for the cost of a sector or two worth of physics simulation.

As far as knowing they have hangars, it's because they were spewing fighters out en masse.

I appreciate the thoughtful response, but the points I make destroy building a station or stations, even if I arm it to the teeth it's doomed to death if the AI can do a single point of damage to it. I can earn wealth but it becomes a pure matter of patrolling, watching my miners rip apart sectors and then moving on. Honestly sometimes the AIs come in and just idle after killing a random loader, and it's easier to just let them be, I don't get anything worthwhile most times for killing the pirates and Xsotan, so I might as well not bother.

23 hours of play, and I've come to realize that the AI factions have infinite ships, they're effectively invulnerable and the only reason they don't dump 1000 ships into a system isn't strategic, it's an artificial limitation purely in place to keep performance high. There's no settable, meaningful goals that they aren't inherently able to counter, I'd only win strategic victories through artificial, boring limitation. The AI have decided they like long, 1-3 block wide and tall ships that are outright unfun to fight because every hit causes these multi-kilometer long straws to spin around wildly from the physics impulse of being shot. Three separate factions are using this design and it's not fun. Titanium is effectively required and while I've finally got a decent amount of it in systems, the AI somehow are building carriers that spew large numbers of fighters, even though their ships are made from Iron and Titanium. Basically the AI cheats to the point that it destroys any long term goal-setting and makes me have zero desire to play. Admittedly I'm sad, I bought myself a copy, and a friend, we've played almost exclusively together, and while there are some multiplayer issues, they're honestly not bad at all, even just running a local host. I thought I'd finally found a game in X3's style, but what I found was a functionally broken game with a whole lot of good ideas with incomplete or shoddy implementation. Before I hear "It's early access" I'd like to point out that the Early Access description says So, mostly story and some more block features, nothing about AI changes, or raw gameplay. So this is the final state of the game in regards to the parts that are so painful, and it makes me sad.

Would just like to chime in that it's very weird that they're immune to the 'click the block' mode from the build panel.

I've built a nice, pure titanium little miner, itty bitty little thing with three turrets, I did this because I realized that if your turrets are even remotely good, then the main factor for getting around is how fast you move rock to rock. It has a nice top speed, just a bit north of 210m/s. The AI refuses to fly faster than 70m/s even when moving very long distances from asteroid pocket to asteroid pocket. I thought the reasoning for this was that it was scared the it would run into thing, as I saw it CONSTANTLY firing the braking thrusters, so I gave it 89m/s of braking thrust, the result? It flies even slower at 60m/s. How do I get the AI to utilize at LEAST half of it's speed? I have a miner made almost completely from Iron and it flies around at 130m/s rock to rock all the time, and I can't figure out WHY.