I'm nowhere near attacking the AI homeworlds, I was thinking more that I didn't want to run into an insane special forces fleet when making my fourth shard retrieval.
To be fair though after the heroic re-nerfifying I wasn't really feeling any pain at 530 AIP anyway. That may have something to do with the 2 superforts, 2 neinzul forts, 2 spire forts, 2 zenith forts, full cap of Mk 1 and 2 fortresses, full cap of OMDs and Armor Inhibitors, and full caps of 4 different types of core turrets on every planet within 2 hops of a hostile AI world. Even spread over four main access points, that's still a lot of firepower.
Why yes, I do currently have three zenith generators. And yet that core spider turret controller over there still looks tempting...
p.s. my economy is currently running at +19,000 metal per second, exclusive of salvage. I'm seriously considering building matter converters to hit that 12 million energy achievement.