I'd much prefer a more streamlined, predictable AI—competent in its ability to challenge the player—rather than one with oodles of unpredictability at the expense of its own intelligence. After all, its artificial intelligence, not artificial RNG.
Oodles of unpredictability and RNG is a little exaggerated for what i was proposing. I disagree that it's not possible and would be at the detriment of the AI - even feeling like more would prefer not playing against the exact same enemy doing the exact same thing with the exact same research and fleet comps etc, every, single, game. Not completely different either, but not the exact same. Does it really have to be one extreme or the other? Seems a little shortsighted.
What the rest of the game does or doesn't have has nothing to do with ship design, further, saying a mechanic shouldn't be expanded on because other mechanics are isn't really a good basis for a good argument.
Lastly, what i'm suggesting (not to the extremes that you were) would be easily doable and not at the detriment of the AI, while substantially increasing replayability. For example How hard would it be to:
-Have a race that say rolled the Cunning personality trait out of its pool of secondary traits, or say rolled a 4 Cunning (out of 10 with that races specific parameters being 2 - 5) to have a combined sensor score in its fleet for (ease of) example 400 out of 1000. Next game maybe it's a low roll of 2 and so only 200 out of 1000 combined fleet sensor score and so is a little more blind.
They can achieve this variance easily, by adding a dedicated sensor support ship or two when rolling a higher personality score, or having a secondary regular ship design with an extra sensor or 2 and sprinkling those ships into the fleet (I feel like component slots would actually be great for this kind of thing.)
-Having a usually somewhat average tempered race roll the Temper trait or a higher Temper score, that might see it have instead of usually around 400 fleet firepower score around a certain time, have 600 instead. Again adding extra dedicated ships with alot more firepower, each ship with a bit more each, or a combination of the two.
-Having a race that rolls either Intellect or a high intellect score that usually builds for close range, that might see it incorporate tractor beams or boarding pods into its design (if it didn't already), longer range maybe even a bit faster and more agile, or smaller but more numerous to make harder to chase down each one etc. Maybe being smarter its ships bail out of the fight a little sooner if its clearly not winning to save on repairs and down time. Say when fleet HP reaches 60% instead of 40% or a smaller difference between fleet strength going your way.
That's what it'd look like under the hood - easy slight parameter adjustments and variances, while on the surface it has an awesome element of realism to it - just because a certain person or nation belongs to a certain species doesn't automatically mean they'll act the exact same way - you need to pay attention to their personality each game and it might slightly change up how things play out, adding again much more replayability and a little more variety.
Because after all - it's artificial intelligence.
