The AI cheating is known and documented.The AI pays half maintenance costs for their fleets.
The fact that they're apparently doubling down on that by letting the AI cheat to surpass the fleet limit is disappointing, but not surprising. Wiz is a big ol' liar, apparently, and that's that. He told players for a long time the AI did not cheat at all, and here we see he programmed it to actually cheat even more now. That's.... weird. People assume 4X AIs cheat, they kind of need to generally to compete with humans, so why lie about it?
So I'm playing the 2.02 beta, and in some ways I kind of like the direction they've taken war exhaustion, separating out occupation completely, so war exhaustion is just something that goes up, never down with territory changing hands. However, the point system still doesn't really work.
For example, in a recent game, I decided to vassalize a neighbor. Naturally, they said no, so naturally we went to war. After invading and taking over every single system and planet and blowing up every single ship they didn't have enough exhaustion to surrender. Like... surrender? It's already over, and the game used to realize this and allow you to force a surrender in that situation.
So I had to just wait a while, until their exhaustion ticked up enough on its own to push them over the magic number and allow surrender.
That's absurd. I wasn't trying to wipe them out, I was trying to make them my vassals. Just showing up with my navy should have scared them into surrender, I had like 10x the strength of them. Certainly blowing up every last one of their warships, science vessels, and construction ships should have made their decision easy. Certainly the fact that I occupied their capital was something they should have been worried about... They should have been thrilled I was offering both my protection and access to my fantastic tech... Instead the AI insisted on being completely stomped, which obviously puts them further from victory.
Needing to go so far above and beyond just winning the war is kind of silly. I understand territory wars are much more straightforward, basically if you claim it and you occupy it, it's yours, which makes sense.