I'm glad that improvements are coming to the AI. But I've not seen anything mentioned about the AI declaring war. To me this is the one thing spoiling an excellent game.
1) It seems to me that an AI faction rarely goes to war with another AI faction without the human getting involved, paying one faction to go to war with another. The AI will prefer war with a human even if there are weaker AI factions closer to them.
2) The AI will declare war on the human if they are out of range.
3) The AI will ask for too much for a peace if you don't have a higher military power. They won't give you much if you have crushed them, certainly not on parity.
4) 2 and 3 means that an AI faction will declare war on you forever unless you give them everything you have in a peace deal causing other factions to declare war on you more easily as you remain at war even though neither side can fight each other.
5) The AI builds too many small worthless ships early. This builds their military power while sacrificing their tech.
6) Tech doesn't seem to be factored into military power or isn't factored high enough. An example of 5 and 6 from my last game was me destroying around 100 AI ships using only 12 of my own (4 groups of 3). Unless the AI's plan was to bore me to death this isn't an effective strategy for them.
There's probably more factors I have forgotten/not thought of. I feel these are the main ones. From my limited technical know how they don't seem like they would be too hard to fix. There could also be a little nerfing of the negative opinion modifiers if necessary. But since most of those problems are interrelated fixing one or two could change the AI behaviour significantly.
Or maybe I'm alone in having a problem with this? Either way let me know.