Thoughts on AI ship design tweaks

[Xxzard]

I am a longtime player, so take this with a grain of salt because I've played many campaigns, but I would really appreciate if the AI decision making process for ship design was tweaked slightly in a few areas.

1) During the transition from predreadnoughts to dreadnoughts, I feel the AI consistently over invests in BBs and especially BCs that have only 4 main guns in an A-Y turret arrangement, and a large 6" casemate mounted secondary battery. Often the whole first generation of BCs from AI nations is this configuration. While I don't want to say this design is 'wrong', as this is a plausible, if conservative, design approach, it feels like I've seen this happen in every recent game. In my current game, 3 out of 8 AI nations built this type of BC design. Almost any player (or historic) design for a first generation BB or BC is superior, and this handicaps the challenge the AI can provide when it builds say 4 of these inadequate ships, completely failing to comprehend the power of all big gun layouts. Historically, there were varied approaches to the design of transitional all big gun capital ships which would be great to see in the game rather than this common poor design. I would ideally like to see each AI nation adopt a design strategy, e.g., French and Japanese building semi-dreadnoughts, US waiting to build A-B-X-Y turret arrangements, Italy/Austria waiting for triple turrets.

2) The AI seems to rarely build ships to their maximum dock size. I often see new 20000 ton ships being built when the building nation has 30000 ton docks, and the escalation of capital ship size seems much slower than historical as a result.

3) The ship selection for 'second rank' AI nations often seems to come up with perplexingly weak designs. I've seen many new build 13 inch gun armed BCs in the mid 20s for example that just don't make sense. I'm not sure if the AI is perhaps pursuing a 'quantity over quality' approach in these cases, but even quantity ships need to be somewhat competitive.

I am playing on beta .79, but I think this applies to recent stable versions as well.