I've been going through a lot of the AI's in Celestial Garden and Earthforce layer, tweaking levels, adding super items, and adjusting the swarms. So far, I think it's looking really nice.

With the swarms, what I've done is instead of make a number of AI's in a particular team spawn based on the size of the universe, I've changed them to a few fixed sized, pre-named teams each, where the team will all spawn at once together in one spot and each guy has a 50% XP bonus attached. I then left a number of unteamed guys of the same type sprinkled around in numbers proportional to the universe size. So we'll still have teams, and they will be harder to fight, but they won't be insane swarms, and you will get bonus XP if you do fight them.

Is the location that the team spawns random by DF? Also, will the entire team respawn somewhere else once it's completely killed off, or is it more like a designated HQ for that particular AI team?

Squads of 4-5 AI are just fine; they will be hard, but managable, especially if you know you get a bonus for killing each one! The annoying part is when you run into a bunch of AI that you have no reason to kill, they can kill you in seconds, and even if you get one close to dying it just runs off to regen while the rest finish the job!

Sounds like it will be great, though; looking forward to leveling my 6th char with the new system!

The other thing I'm doing is adding an "aggro radius" to a lot of the AI, so that even if they are naturally hostile to you, unless you've attacked them or their team before, they won't go after you unless you get within a certain distance (which will be less than their radar range which is what they use now.) This should help prevent the situation where you jump into a galaxy, and then AI converge on you from 1000's of distance away from every corner of the galaxy.

Cheers, it might even fix the swarms. And now the risk is at least worth it.