To me it appears AI follows these rules in tactical mode and therefore builds predictably bad ships. Each ship size has fixed number of beams, missiles, other weapons and special equipment of best available type, regardless of item size and space limitation.

Nope, it follows completely different rules, it's mostly dice roll driven (like ground combat) and ship are automatically designed following specific rules.

Most players are familiar with tactical and sane person would assume that 'strategic' is the same as tactical where computer playes both sides. The game had two combat modes: strategic and tactical. Point #1 is the most troubling one and I thinks it's the reason why AI was so catastrophically bad at designing ships. Ray Fowler, guy behind Remnants of Precursors (former JavaMoo) wrote a blog post ( link) more which applies to MoO 2 AI. AI had it's shortcomings, I guess it's inevitable unless serious effort gets invested in developing it. Misclicks and having to do it all over again was frequent.Д¬lick to expand.You don't have to say it twice. It was especially annoying when having to re-order trade goods to be last in the queue in all colonies when a new building was available and we wanted it in most if not all of the colonies. Had to click an item in the queue and then click in the position where they should move. I hated how the game handled trade goods and housing in the building queue in terms of UI, and queue reordering in general.

Agreeing or disagreeing is not the point, or the priority, since most of these issues are personal in nature. The idea is to list as many of this big or small irritations as possible, since we believe that those are golden opportunities to improve the gameplay experience. We're especially interested in knowing what your pet peeves with the game were, if any, as for any kind of annoyance or something the game did that irritated you. Of equally importance, however, is to not neglect what it also did worst. Since we're doing a spiritual successor to Master of Orion 2, it's important that we manage to capture its essence in what it did best.

Master of orion space monsters