I remember seeing that from difficulty 8 onward actually, having planets (especially 3-4 planets) that could match your entire fleet.
Some planets, sure. Especially Mk4. Those are likely going to take multiple attacks unless you have a lategame fleet or major superweapons. But, iirc, if you tried to kite around a beefy MkIV planet you were going to get shredded by something because you'd wind up with too much distance to the wormhole. It was more a hit-and-run thing.
I also remember lots of threatballs that the player had absolutely no way to take on offensively with its own fleet.
Yea, if you don't stop threat from accumulating, and you have heavy defenses, the threatballs will grow large (because smaller ones couldn't break your defenses). But generally these won't be along your whole border unless you've only got one or two entry points. If you
do have only one entry point, and especially if you've spent lots of K on turretry instead of mobile stuff, then the AI does do a bit of "returning the favor" of your having stonewall defenses.
One of them was to wake the planet up, which "freed" the enemy ships from defense, made them threat. And there was a few ways to get rid of even overwhelming threat. From what you say - and what I've seen from the design doc, this won't work the same anymore as the ships will go back to defend the worlds rather than being threat ? I'm not sure about that point.
Freed ships will stay free, as before. If anything it will be easier to free larger chunks of a planets defenders, since they come after you and once you shoot at them they're freed (as in Classic).
One thing to bear in mind is that in a #1 situation it doesn't send all the guardians after you. Just those within a certain guard radius of your ships. It's only if you come in with something that poses a threat to the planet as a whole that it concentrates its local forces. Partly this is to make the AI resistant to easy feints (while you send the main force in another way), and partly it's to make the AI overconfident enough that you can usually achieve some favorable kill-to-loss rate even on a doom planet.
The other thing that was mostly preventing this was the command station that prevented alertness on the AI worlds. Which I believe is gone ?
The station itself, yes. But most/all of the old command station functions will still be available through structures you can build on the planet. The Jammer will probably cost a fair bit of Power, which means fewer turrets or whatever on that specific planet (due to Power being per-planet), but it's a good option to include.
Thing is the high numbers of AI units in AI War I worked because the defenses were "more" static.
So... I'm basically worried about losing that "overwhelming forces" feeling, yeah - because the more responsive the AI is, the less it needs forces to actually be stronger than the player.
That said, as you stated, it's balancing numbers. It's going to be hard to theorycraft.
It will be a difficulty shift, yes, due to the qualitative boost to the AI's use of its forces. And the AI's overall forces will still be quantitatively overwhelming. But I have total confidence in the sneakiness of players, to still achieve victory against ridiculous odds
It may mean a lot of people using lower difficulty settings than they did in Classic, at least for a while, but I don't think that's a bad thing.