I keep seeing situations where the AI races are able to send colony ships to planet that are impossibly far out of their range. In some cases I know they do this through the use of Alliances, but I recently saw a case where a planet that was 8 parsecs away from my closest planet, was colonized by a opponent whose closest planet was 5 parsecs away from my farthest planet from the planet in question, so it must have been at at least 13 or so parsecs away from them, and this was early in the game where their range tech couldn't have been more than 7.
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How does the AI range bug work?
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Do you have a save file?
By the time they could have R7, AIs are likely to have Reserve Fuel Tanks on their colony ships (they don't put tanks on any of their other ships except the unarmed, starting Scout design) and they do take advantage of alliances to colonize unclaimed planets far away, with or without fuel tanks. They also have no range limit on their transports as long as they have a fleet in orbit, and I have a suspicion (I've seen it once, but I think in a 1oom game, and it's difficult to confirm) that their ships don't crash for lack of fuel bases if they take orbit far away (because of losing an alliance or a forward colony). I suspect what you described is a case of an alliance (perhaps since lapsed) with another race that's closer to the star in question, perhaps from another angle, but it's hard to be sure without the save.
Actually this is from the OSG you guys are playing, so I didn't want to state any spoilers. Looks like you guys are past this now though, so it should be fine. I was using this file: https://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/show...#pid834846
So a Bulrathi ship came in from Thrax. I thought it was going to Keeta, but it actually headed to Pollus. Actually Pollus is 7 parsecs from my closest system and Thrax is 4 in the other direction. But anyway, it must have been at least 10 if not more parsecs from the closest Bulrathi system. At the time I had the Inferno tech but was just going to wait for Range 8 to bother colonizing it because I figured no one else could get to it. But I've seen other scenarios where an AI will seemingly be able to send a colony ship from out of nowhere to to some place way across the map. In this case, there couldn't be any alliance in play. There were no other races with colonies anywhere near Pollus either. |
