Simple Example of AI Fuel Cheat Impact

[RandomAttack]

This has happened to me numerous times in the first 50 years-- esp. with Urgans & Drills. Normal difficulty.

- You start exploring with your Scout and immediately start building a Colonizer.
- You find no immediately habitable systems within ~7K of your homeworld. Note this is FAR beyond the range of YOUR Corvettes. If you build a longer range Corvette you MUST gut it of weapons-- which makes it just cannon fodder. AI units having fuel cheats do NOT have to gut theirs...
- You get a nice Earthlike world 7-10K away, and colonize it as soon as you can. But it's totally undeveloped and you can't really even build fighters yet because they will take so long. Plus they are no match for boson-gun armed Urgan Corvettes anyway...

--- So maybe 20 years have gone by---

Out of nowhere, TWO Drill/Urgan Corvettes show up at your new world-- which means they have done nothing but build these two Corvettes-- no colonizing yet, etc. Of course it's still undefended. They immediately declare war and "besiege" it. They can't conquer it (yet), but you can neither develop your only colony nor relieve it because of the range. And they sit there. Forever. I have documented this happening from at LEAST 15K h.u. away from the nearest enemy colony.

Might as well quit and start over. Even when this doesn't happen-- I assume these two races are either not in the game or on the other side of the Galaxy-- unless you (out of sheer luck) have a habitable chain within *your* Corvette range there is no long-term answer except to race to the Frigate tech. Hopefully you can get there before Urgans/Drills find you and a never-ending stream of uber-Corvettes (soon carrying bombs & fighters) start attacking your colonies from insane distances. Even early bare-bones Frigates can deal with them. But this binary approach sucks all the fun from the game.

If the AI can't function without "infinite fuel", then the AI has seriously problems. To the point it breaks the game IMO.

[bjgrt]

Let's temporary put aside the "fuel cheat" and see what else can be done.
If they can't conquer it, why can't you develop it? I think you can build everything but fleet under "blockade".
Have you considered building a tanker? Tankers is the way to move military fleet in the early game.
Also you can disassemble some of your fleet, move it to the target system (using your Scout) before enemy (or even the Colonizer) gets there, and assemble it there (requires additional metal). I personally don't like that tactic, but people use it.

[RandomAttack]

Reasonable ideas, but often you simply don't get time. I'm talking about the first 20 years or so here as the critical time. And you can only disassemble fighters & satellites-- not Corvettes. It takes 5-7 years to build ships at start. So if you build a Colonizer, then a bunch of fighters, and dedicate your standard Scout to ferry them to the first colony, in a "worst case" scenario you might have 10 fighters there when those 2 Corvettes come cruising in-- no match at all. I usually play with "blockaded planets don't have access to global resources" (which seems "real" to me), so if you are blockaded you can't do much.

Say I build a Colonizer, a Tanker and 3 Corvettes (because I need at least 3 to beat 2 of theirs). That's about 35 years right there just to build them. Quite possibly too late. Which also means you aren't expanding at all because you are too busy worrying about ghosts that may/may not appear. At harder levels this means falling way behind everyone else.

No question, IF you can survive the first 20 years or so w/o my example happening then there are several ways to mitigate the impact. But if it happens as early as I've seen it happen, you really don't have much in the way of options except to hope maybe they will just go away. Or maybe in 35 years you can build a Tanker & Corvettes to drive them off-- assuming they don't invade the colony first (it happens once in awhile).

Since we haven't received an explanation as to the exact nature of this, I can't see any way to effectively mitigate it except to mod all the fuel tanks to give more fuel. Since the AI probably gets infinite fuel anyway it doesn't impact them. But it probably will have some unintended consequences down the road. I will tinker with it myself to see how it works, but it's not really the solution I would prefer. On the plus side, it does away with much of the need for tankers, etc., which is B.S anyway if it only applies to the player. If I can have stock Corvettes w/10K range or more this is MUCH less an issue. But will probably need some house rules to keep me from doing to the AI what it does to me.

Finally, I can only remember ever seeing the Urgans & Drills doing this. Maybe because they are coded to build a couple of Corvettes immediately or something? So I guess I could cut them out of the game and see if anyone else does it-- but I LIKE fighting those guys!

[Ufnv]

You better move a satellite to that world. It's a perfect defence against corvettes early game.

[RandomAttack]

Wow, you make it hard to keep being nice. Are you being purposefully dense?? Are you even READING the example?? You often don't have TIME to build a Colonizer, a Cargo ship, then a Satellite BEFORE the uber-Corvettes come calling. And if you DO get a chance to do that (by some minor miracle) for every planet, at the end of 100 years or so you will have only settled 3 colonies at best. And you will be hopelessly behind. Do the math. These uber-Corvettes often arrive within the FIRST TWENTY YEARS.

Another problem is how all the races often get clustered in one part of the Galaxy. In a game last night, the Gravakens came calling to my HOMEWORLD with a Corvette and 80 fighters at the 22 year mark! Of course it turned out their homeworld was only about 20K away from mine at the very start, with initially uninhabitable systems in between. So the fuel cheat basically killed the game right from the start-- esp. when combined with ridiculous start positions.

[RandomAttack]

I've found a way to somewhat offset the AI fuel cheat, with two variations:

1) In the equipment file simply double the fuel capacity of the Level I & II fuel cells. At the very least it gives you a chance to build your own stock Corvettes with ~10K range-- which most times is enough to at least get them to the fight.

2) Just double ALL the fuel cells capacity. The effect is then scaled throughout.

Some of the impacts I've noticed:
- As you reduce the number of fuel cells needed for a desired range, you also reduce weight and power requirements. Which means more/better weapons loadouts and/or increased speed for a given range. Which seems only fair since I routinely see AI freighters cruising at tremendous speeds from one end of my territory to the other without pause (which again leads me to believe fuel isn't even a factor for them).
- You hardly ever need tankers anymore. Which I always thought was a pain anyway.
- It will raise hell with all your current designs, in that you will need to go in and tweak your fuel/power capacities to something reasonable-- I am not advocating "mega fuel" for the player. But it will have to be something self-imposed.

From a couple of games through just the first hundred years (most critical time) it seems to take the edge off the fuel cheat. Although it DOESN'T help if you get slammed in the first 20 years or so. Not much to do then but restart. I think I favor #2 right now.