I thought about that, but it really begs the question: to what purpose? If the balance can be made to work without going through that extra complexity, then it's not worthwhile to add in the extra CPU demands or coding time, is where I'm coming from. As carlosjuero points out, I sort of hedged in the last release and that had mixed results that wound up with a lot of bum rushing on certain saves, etc.
It's a fair point, my thought was that the AI needed all its ships to preserve the balance of things. If you've got a way around that, then there's no need.
Well, whether or not I've achieved that or not is certainly a point that could be debated -- but I think there are simpler, more interesting ways to adjust the balance, at any rate. Having new AI-specific weapons like the guard posts are a good example of that, versus just cramming 5000 core ships into a planet.
In this particular case, when the AI finds that it's already crammed itself full of ships, then it tries to send out some border aggression to give a trickle of threat to the player, but that's only moderately interesting -- and it gets to be too much rather quickly. Slightly more interesting is the AI Barracks, where the overflow gets sent, but that would quickly become nothing but a tedious extra grindy step if it was carried too far.
Right now my focus is more on larger, specialized, fun-different-rules type of weapons in the hands of the AI, that can hopefully combine to create interesting puzzles for the players. So far the focus has been simply on the seeding of those from the start, but if reinforcements cap out there's always the potential that the AI could latently build some new big weapons in those circumstances. Of course, that then requires some new powers for the human players to let them suppress that, and that's getting into another phase of design for the game that I'm not ready to work on yet, but which I think will add an interesting new level.
The amount of playtesting that the current setup has had is what I would term "minimal," in the sense that it takes a lot of testing to really see if the balance is good, or what. If it turns out to be too easy, I don't think that just throwing a few extra ships on the core planets, or into something like barracks on those planets, will really do the trick. I think it would be a new style of reinforcement mechanism layered on top of the existing reinforcements setup, to really provide the varied texture I want, rather than just increasing the grind.
Anyway, that's the line of thinking I've been going down, at any rate.
