Hey, Chris, have you thought about using antagonistic neural networks to create an AI that isn't omniscient, but instead it guesses at where your ships are based on what scouting it's done? I've learned about similar ones that take image features, and then reproduce what it thinks the original image looked like.
You could feed this ai similar features as in what ships it's scouted, how many ships of each kind you think the player has, and how many were killed as well as how long ago, and it could guess at where the rest of the player's fleets are.
I feel a learning AI of this type might throw some players through loops, and at the same time make scouting a priority for the AI as well.
(Split by Chris to remove the unrelated quoted text and move this into its own topic)