Game with excessive speed and AI behavior that seems llike it knows things it shouldn't
When I started this game, I did like I usually do and saved the game before doing anything else. The save is availble here. Before I could settle Artemis, a race came from the FOW and settled it on turn 2. I was very mad because I felt it was an obvious sign of cheating. I started a new game.
Later, I decided to investigate what happened so I could see where the colony ship came from and why it knew about Artemis. I loaded the save and didn't do anything on turn 1. I ended my turn and let the AI have their turn 1. I then used the console and fowtrans and god commands to see and investigate everything. There was a colony ship already targeted on Artemis and it had 24 moves. The number of moves explained why it could colonize during turn 2. I found the race was the Baratak Grove.
I continued to turn 2, and the colony ship colonized Artemis. There was now a second Baratak Grove colony ship targeted on Artemis.
I continued to turn 3, and the colony ship that was targeted on Artemis moved in a different direction and colonized a different planet.
I then investigated some other races and found they also had a lot of moves. I eventually checked everyone (I had all races in the game) and found that ships had either 24, 27 or 30 moves, except the pirate ships had 33 moves.
I then checked and found that the Baratak Grove doesn't have a colonizable planet in its home system, which explained why it was sending the colony ship somewhere else to colonize.
QUESTIONS: How did the colony ship know about Artemis on turn 1? The AI was building a probe at the shipyard, so it must have rushed a colony ship to get the second one targeted on Artemis. Why did the AI rush a colony ship to send to Artemis when it already had a ship going there? I think the answer to the second question is that the AI doesn't know what it is already doing, so it keeps doing it again. That brings the question of why doesn't it know what it's already doing? Automated AI survey ships don't try to survey the same anomaly because they know that they already have a ship going there. That was a change made early in GalCiv3 so they would no longer all try to survey the same anomaly and end up in a fleet. That solved the "not knowing what they were already doing" problem for survey ships, so why isn't it implemented for everything else?
Some more information: If I use the fow command immediately, the AI can see the whole map before doing anything. In this case, the colony ship targets the Precursor world at the bottom of the map. To me, this indicates the AI doesn't see all the planets at the start of the game, so why does it know about Artemis? Also, the AI still rushes a second colony ship and sends it to the same Precursor world. While it knows about the Precursor world, it either doesn't know about or doesn't care about the Space Monsters in the chosen path for the colony ships, which explains why the first colony ship is captured and the second colony ships does the same thing and also gets captured. It is things like this that handicap the three AI that don't have colonizable planets in their starting systems, so I no longer include them in my games. The other two AI with this problem are The Navigators and Xeloxi.
Back to the speed problem. I thought it was just something odd in that game and didn't think of it anymore until about 2 days ago when someone on Discord mentioned also having the problem. I think that shows there is something odd that happens sometimes that gives a big speed boost to all AI ships. I'll be on the lookout for it so I can provide more information if it ever happens to me again.
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