How do I deal with Ai passiveness

[emperormao]

Ah... about the AI swarming you when you're clearing a path for your scouts.

• Mark 4 Scouts (fleet/starship) are immune to decloaking
• Special Forces Patrol will protect certain systems. CSGs are a good indicator, but if they've been blown up, the AI will still protect things like advanced factories, broken golems.
• If the guardians of a system have been knocked over to threat behavior, they'll always intercept. You can check this by having a scout there and hovering over the threat counter until the tooltip gives you the breakdown, or through a certain galaxy view filter I've bound to a hotkey.
• If they're on guard behavior, it can pay to just send one mark's cap of bombers, preferably mark 1. The game used to do a firepower comparison but I believe it's been switched to a more accurate strength comparison. Anyways, the planetary ai will compare your 'firepower' to the local 'firepower' and will only agro the entire system if you're too strong. In other words, a single cap of mark 1 fighters can often fly in, take out a tachyon guardian sentinels, queue movement well away from other command stations, and then hit the other tachyon guardians sentinels and jump through with your expendable fighters to get the tachyon guardian on the other side.
• If you've cleared out the tachyon sentinels, you can pull back your pickets and send them out on a full force expedition. When they're done, simple select your replacements and alt-right click on empty space and "auto-picket".
• Beware raid engines when clearing tachyon sentinels.

This might sound like a dumb question, but how do you get mk 4 ships?

I can only ever research up to mk 3 .

[orzelek]

After you researched up to Mk III you need to find one of Advanced factories.
There are usually 2 of these for fleet ships and 2 for starships on map.