Aurora is not a good game it you exploit the game mechanics to "win", completely broken since there are many loopholes you can abuse against the AI.
This game is not meant to play to "win" in the normal sense because there are no way to win. You are supposed to set your own limitations and be imaginative, this was the original purpose of the game the way I understand it. Since there are no condition to "win" the game that definition is left up to you when you play. Your definition of winning are as viable as mine, there is no "proper" way to play this game.
Space Master is a direct feature of the game so you can just magically give you everything you want, that is per definition the most efficient way to beat anyone in the game if you want to be a bit silly about it, but that is a cheap shot argument...
The first sentence just reads like: "If you can learn to beat the AI then it's a bad game." Nearly every game with AI is gonna have that issue unless the game is extremely basic.
Hey... wait a second...I definitely wouldn't mind if Steve actually did create the option for hard win conditions. It'd give me something to work towards so that I'm not basically just playing until the game starts to slow down and then re-rolling a new one.
All I can say about your argument that a debugging/GMing tool is intended for you to always use to cheat and kill everything with is this: ¯\_(?)_/¯
Aurora is too complex for a decent AI. It tries to be too many things at one time and no AI can even remotely compete with that. The AI in Aurora are basically scripted bots. Only meant to give you some entertainment while you build your civilization the way you imagine your story.
There are many ways the game could be improved to increase both realism and automation. In my opinion an expanded civilian/state economy would make the game even more fun and more actual important choices to make rather than more less important/fun repetitive decisions. But that is just my opinion.
It seems like your entire argument as far as why the game should be so radically altered into an aquarium game is because the AI is bad. I really don't think it's such a tall order to make the AI not suck, that what you've suggested is the only alternative.
I mean, really...
Doctors hate him! Local Australian smegposter mastered Aurora's economy in four easy steps! Click to learn more!:- Put automated mines with mass drivers in as many places as humanly possible
- Automate the movement of resources from those mines using freighters on looping pickup/dropoff orders back to...
- ... a handful of forge worlds which are close together (probably including the capitol) and which make up 90% (arbitrary number, but probably at least that much) of your production capacity and research.
- spam money printer colonies everywhere else that's easily terraformed
Those four things are all the AI needs to know how to do in order to compete with a human in the economic aspect of the game, so that it doesn't have to cheat as much. I don't really believe this is going to be impossible to make bots do even if they're basically scripted.
And neither do you for that matter, since you more or less want the civilian and state economy to be able to do all of this automatically with minimal player input.
Really, I think any further depth that exists in this part of the game is simply imagined. In the case of veterans it's because they've been playing the game with personal limitations for so long, and in the case of newbies it's because of the arcane UI.
This cycle of contradiction has occurred in nearly every back and forth between us so far... but, well...I don't think this game tries to be very many things at all. It can be, just because of the flexibility of whatever ruleset you decide to play under (the same way Distant Worlds can), but from a cold and purely mechanical perspective? The perspective that actually matters for a game's AI? Well, from that perspective, the current VB6 version doesn't seem like it wants to be much more than a very logistically-oriented wargame. Since the vast majority of C#'s actual mechanical changes seem to be about combat and military organisation/logistics, I'm inclined to think that this isn't really gonna change for the foreseeable future. Unless the next 3 pages of the changelog are all about empire management and civilians.
I've already said it, but if you wanna make the AI into an obstacle for players, the "wargame" is the main part you need to make them better at. Even if they just made ships that aren't horrendous it'd be a massive improvement.