One of the worst things about the AI while playing on Endless is how they make these seemingly useless ships that use melee ranged Beams and missiles.



What's even more confusing is how strictly bad these choices are (to use those weapons at those ranges) compared to their optimum ranges, while Kinetics according to general consensus is even better at Long Range than they are at their optimum melee range....what gives?



Why do LR and MR beams have roughly the same damage numbers but when you toggle it to melee it suddenly has 1/3 of the damage?



Why does Missile have progressively lower evasion scores the lower the range you go (and why does the accuracy dip during MR then goes back up at Melee?) The lower tonnage doesn't seem to explain at all these decreases in effectiveness, because if you're making the trade-off to have them fire later (and firing later is always strictly worse than firing earlier) it seems that lower range Beams and Missiles should be much better than they actually are in-game.



So why does the AI go for them at all?

Yeah, the weapons and ranges aren't very well balanced. Long range kinetics are considered to be the best from what I've read and my experience seems to confirm that. I'm sure you can find a mod to fix either the weapon balancing or the AI's build designs.