So if I get you correctly:
You should consider to sign up 5 bots for every signup from a player so that targets become plentiful.
And with late joining bots, late joining players have targets too.
But ofc, as you indicate, this will boost the active and experienced players the most, and they will race ahead faster than before with target abundancy.
I thought there were severe limitations in play when it comes to who you can attack (score-differences etc), so a small planet can't be hit by a large one, hence it seems unlikely to be hit every night for 3-4 weeks? Or is this not the case anymore?
I am still leaning towards my old statement though, that to "fix" Planetarion, it needs to be made into something "un-Planetarionish" first.
But, since you did bring up these bot-planets...I see one very cool thing about them, and that is their potential when it comes to training new users. Single-player wise, the bots are ideal for "target practice", to learn and see which ships are best used against this or that kind of fleet. And no, the stats-page is not doing the same job, teach them ingame, and have quests to overcome these "single-player-bots".
"Take out the fleet at Testplanet 1 15:7 using no more than 20 ships" etc. Then he would have to scan it, figure out what kind of ships he has, and learn what kind of ships he should use...Thats just an example, but it's something that could be made quite interesting. Finish the quest, and receive some free ship of a suitable type, that might have to do with the next quest...and so on...
Anyway, good luck with your AI-bots
