I'm positive the player AI is significantly worse than the enemy AI. Enemy ships press the attack when they need to and back off when they're at high flux or getting fucked. My ships will suicidally charge when they're at high flux or dying, and back off when they need to press an attack. Add to that the AI getting to cheat (Their CR NEVER drops. I've watched, their CR stays at 70% by the time mine's dropped to ~30%, and I'm pretty sure they can change orders on-the-fly while you only get 5 command points and have to spend ages waiting to get a single one back) and even fair battles are fraught with peril.
Starsector
EDIT: I've discovered why I'm so bad at pursuit. Your own ships are, when pursuing, cowards. You set them to chase down a freighter with a single PD gun and even with an exterminate order on the ship they'll do their damndest to keep out of range of the enemy gun, which means the enemy is out of range of *their* guns. If I want to get anywhere, I have to take control of a ship and chase the enemy down myself.
Starsector
For what it's worth, Player AI is the same as Enemy AI and there aren't CR cheats (at least without mods).
I'm running unmodded and I've yet to EVER see enemy CR drop from 70% unless I've done stuff like harrassment before engaging or they've done an emergency burn. I've no idea what's causing that if they're supposed to drop as combat goes on.
I'm trying a commitment run, but I've decided to savescum for the second time (First was because I realised I forgot to disable toxic fallout) because the game's in love with two things: Giving every single colonist a bad back, and ensuring body parts are destroyed/removed at the slightest provocation. I lost 6 of 8 colonists at one point and kept going, but having a colony that consists of nothing but limbless people I literally cannot afford to give prosthetics and can't manufacture prosthetics for because my crafter got killed is where I'm drawing the line. If the AI followed the same rules as the player, they'd be sending raids consisting of nothing but limbless individuals because they'd got them chopped off by wildlife/gunfire/scythers/fires detonating explosives
Rimworld
EDIT: I thought I had the game's sensor range down, but nope. An enemy patrol had a large sensor range that overlapped me, so I turned off my transponder. Turned it *off*. I'm looking at the screen right as I'm typing this, it tells me that it's off. While I was in a ring system, which reduces detection by 50% (So they need to be twice as close to spot you). I was still in sensor range. Fine, fair, I got caught out.
Now the confusing bit is that I left the ring system, and their sensor range dropped dramatically. Like they couldn't see three miles from their ships. By this point it was useless, because I was right next to them.
So I'm curious as to what the fuck it is that makes sensors go from being able to spot me from a full gas giant moon system away with your transponder off while you're in a system that makes you harder to detect, to absolutely fuck all once you're out of it.
Starsector
EDIT: Also there was no active sensor burst, so it wasn't that. I could see them the whole time and I recognise that sound because it's the number one cause of all failed smuggling runs.
EDIT: More evidence on the AI cheating in combat: When fleeing enemy fleets, I can only deploy from the rear. When I'm fleeing, the enemy can deploy from
anywhere. I know because I was running and ran face-first into enemy ships that had evidently deployed from the top of the map, ie the direction I needed to be going. If this isn't supposed to be the case, I have genuinely got no good goddamn idea what's going on, because I'm running the latest version and I'm running with literally no mods.