A. "the number of ships on non-neutral planets increases according to the growth rate for that planet."
What does "according" mean - simple addition? And what happens to the neutral planets - no growth? In which case, how many fleets do the neutral planets start with?
b. "If the result is less than zero, then your bot gains control of the planet."
And how many losses have you incurred - exactly the number of defenders? If the defenders win, do they suffer losses equal to the number of attackers?
The reason I'm asking is that, if all the game does is simple addition and subtraction (no defense advantage, no Lanchester-type law for combat), then there probably exists a very simple optimal strategy, and it's more a problem of mathematics than AI.
I've only played with it a little and my impression is that growth rate is an integer that's added to the planet's population every turn, but only occupied planets not neutral ones. (So a planet of yours with a population of 138 and a growth rate of 5 will have a population of 143 next turn (assuming no increase or decrease from friendly or enemy ships).)
The answers to your questions are simple addition, no growth, random numbers, yes, and yes.
http://bestonlinerpggames.com/game/972/Little-stars-for-litt...
I don't see how existence of the optimal strategy entails that this is not the problem of AI. After all, all finite state deterministic games can be essentially solved by traversing the game tree, searching for the best strategy. The thing is that in most games, this approach is not acceptable because of time and space issues. That's why we call for AI - to find a strategy which may not be optimal, but is "good enough" and does not take much resources to find.
Besides, I do not understand why do you think that simple optimal strategy exists. The game of Go has equally simple rules, finding good strategy in it is not easy though.
2) The rules are not clear for me either. Last night I wrote a simple engine for planet wars [1], and I had to make some important decisions about things which the game description did not cover - for instance, what is the order of events in game? Is the number of ships on players' planets increased before or after the fleets arrive to them?