Well from my experience the AI very rarely use them and if they do 9 times out of 10 they'll miss, even 5* in everything.
I wish they had longer range like 10x what they have now, stations already take forever to kill unless you're in an asgard so they won't be over powered, especially if they fixed the combat AI to send out fighters to disable hardpoints on the big ass capital ship shooting it from afar.
It also wouldn't be over powered vs ships as the chance to hit anything from range is significantly reduced, at the minute everything feels unbalanced and face roll.
You could literally have 20 asgard escorted by 500 med and small ships and they would under perform vs 1 player piloted asgard. (Or any destroyer to be fair)
For me this is what is holding X4 back, Yeah the economy etc is mediocre but it works, once you get a shipyard and credits become redundant and you start building and managing your own fleets you come to realise just how bad the AI is.
(First person to say use 5* pilots will get a karate chop to the throat, i've not noticed ANY difference in AI for rank of pilot, the ONLY difference rank gives in my opinion is unlocking more orders/commands and yes i've tested a lot, you can now easy test it yourself with creating your own new game.)
The only AI that ever performed as expected is your wingman at the start of the terran campaign.
He becomes utterly terrible once you unlock and recruit him as your own during the campaign, ends up stupid like everyone else.
I really hope ego do something drastic to improve combat AI or it's off back to x3 which is a shame because i thought X4 really would be a great "foundation" to build upon but from what ive witnessed from the patches since release nothing really gets much better, and the patches tend to break more than they fix.