Nooop

Nothing is spawned. AI empires have corporations that try to make profit using game mechanics. Example: AI empire wants to build a military ship. Spawn one? No! It collects its taxes and orders a ship from the shipyard company. That is what an empire is supposed to do, collect taxes and build military ships. The shipyard company now with money from the empire and an order starts building the ship. It now needs to get the materials so it starts buying materials until fulfilled. If it doesn't get fulfilled it will raise the prices. That's what shipyard companies are supposed to do, sell ships and buy construction materials with the money. The freighter company sees this and will set trade routes between suppliers and the shipyard in it's optimized trade route network (one thing ai should be good at). With the new profits from these trades it will use the money to build new freighters, which is what a freighter company is supposed to do, fulfill price imbalances and buy more freighters with the profit. The shipbuilding materials station has been sitting on a full cargo hold with no buyers until now. So they lower the prices and stop buying iron. Then they are visited by a freighter destined for the shipyard and it takes it all. Now they have a low inventory and more money. They raise the price of its output and start buying iron. If iron does not arrive, it will raise the price of iron. That's what shipbuilding material companies do, they sell shipbuilding materials and use the money to buy iron. If it has enough extra credits it will found a new station. Since the shipbuilding materials company has increased its price for iron, freighters are now visiting miners to fulfill the price imbalance. The miner company uses the extra money to build more miners because that's what miner companies do, they sell iron and buy more miners with the money. The universe could have the Dwarf Fortress backstory generator and each empire starts with one drone at Prime and it builds it's fleets and stations from there. When you start you can choose the age of the universe you want, from just starting to build the first spaceship and empty to developed and full.

Instead of instabuild, ships are built up gradually over time shipyards. Build ships one block at a time, or one layer at a time or another scheme. Little pods with repair lasers shoot the block until its constructed and go to the next one.

Fleet command button: "Investigate". Ship flies near every object in the sector.

Why go through the trouble of having an elaborate voxel based ship construction system and then negate it and turn it into a hp/health bar system?

Problems with pirate raids: Pirates don't pirate. 1. Always attack stations which they have no hope of destroying even if they shoot at it for an hour. 2. Stick around even after fleets of military ships catch up with them. 3. Then fight until destroyed and never flee. 4. After destruction no one tries to salvages wreckage. 5. Random guy in a mini miner can swoop in after battle and get free high level drops from wreckage under the nose of the military ship that just destroyed it. Solutions: 1. Pirates attack cargo ships not close to military ships. 2. Flee before military ships get in range. 3. Flee if in combat and do not have anything but high chance of easy win. 4. AI always salvage after destroy enemy. 5. Illegal to salvage or collect drops from ships destroyed by military ships. Ideas for making pirates pirate better: 1. Use false flagged freighters or miners that look friendly then surprise attack. 2. Use jettison cargo demand ai and player ships. 3. Grab with force turret and board and flee with it before military ships can intercept it. Captured player ships can reappear later as pirates 4. Pirates ask player for payments to operate in a sector and be free from attacks.