Mumblefratz, do you know how the people who are complaining that it's too easy to beat the AI on Suicidal are doing it if not through sneak attacks? We are open to suggestions that are simple and reasonable. If we can come up with a better solution, Brad has confirmed that we will un-nerf the engines.
I don't know for an absolute fact how anyone beats the suicidal AI. I certainly have suppositions and I'm also sure that there are multiple ways to do so and just as sure that there are some folks for which sneak attacks may be the only way.
Sometimes in the early part of a game I often think how the heck can I win this one. Anyway there are a number of ways to gain an advantage. The first and foremost is to simply out colonize the Suicidal AI and end up with more planets and resources. This is an extremely tall order but one I have managed myself on a rare occasion or two. There are others such as Magnumaniac that can do this at will as a matter of course, but here we are talking about folks that can walk on water.
There are a number of other ways involving diplomacy to either get two opponents to go after each other and then pick them off once they've weakened themselves or otherwise gain a strategic advantage over one AI. Or diplomancy can be used to gain a tech advantage. Or you can build a uber tech research planet that produces 20,000 RP's a turn to quickly out research your opponents.
Even without a uber research planet the AI can be outresearched in critical areas by simply concentrating on that area. The AI tend to research evenly across the entire tech tree so even though they have tremendous research, income, etc. bonuses if you stick to a limited set of critical weapons research you can easily have more powerful ships at the point when war breaks out. This does of course force you to give up a lot of otherwise "useful" research and to focus on what you consider "critical" research, but this is the kind of choice that most folks would consider a true legitimate strategy.
Or the simplest way of all is to just try to initially survive by doing just enough to not be a target (the SCC can really help with this) which can give you the time to gradually build yourself up to the point you have parity with at least one of the weaker AI's and can take them over.
Regardless of however you gain that initial victory it's pretty much determined that once you conquer one AI you generally have the planets and resources to straight up battle the remaining AI's even with their huge bonuses, at least as long as you can take them out one at a time and keep them from ganging up on you.
In any case I support this proposal and have always supported the idea that sneak attacks should be somehow restricted. It's just that I thought that the engine nerfage wasn't a complete solution and that it came with the baggage of making ship logistics in my prefered gigantic galaxies more of a headache than it already is.
Another possible method of sneak attack control that I've heard and would have no real problem with is to restrict a fleet to attacking a single planet. Once a fleet attacked a planet it could use any remaining moves to make continued attacks against non-fleeted ships in orbit but could not be used to make attacks on any other planets during the same turn. Or another idea is to allow the "guard" function to define a ship or fleet that would have to be engaged before the planet it's guarding could be attacked. Assumedly this ship/fleet would have to be in the vicinity of a planet to do this, perhaps proximity to a planet would be sufficient to place a fleet on guard and force it to be engaged.
From what I remember of the discussion, Brad's objection was not so much that you could sneak attack but that by doing so you could avoid engaging an AI's potentially superior fleets and ships thus allowing an inferior attack force to beat a superior enemy on the first strike alone. Any method that would "force" someone to essentially reduce someones navy prior to all out invasion would be a reasonable answer to this objection.
This is a classic issue with sea battles in general which is certainly a reasonable model for space battles. In general, battles in open sea cannot be forced because the inferior fleet can almost always escape. The only thing that can "force" an engagement that one side or the other doesn't wish is the threat of an invasion that can't be ignored.
Hopefully this provides a few thoughts on the matter, but I don't object to limiting sneak attacks and I'm sure there are a few folks that may have to turn the difficulty down a notch because of it. I certainly like this magical expulsion of combat ships from your and your opponents ZOC better than engine nerfage because it otherwise doesn't effect how long it takes ships to get to rally points or how long it take to build up a starbase, etc.
However I'm not sure this proposal is really enough. It merely forces your ships to outside their ZOC. So now instead of sitting right next to each planet people will just line up their attack forces outside someones ZOC and still probably be able to wipe an enemy out in short order. I think perhaps the best solution is the one planet attack per fleet/ship per turn. If someone has enough fleets to dedicate a top line fleet to every planet an opponent has then it's no real big deal whether or not they wipe out the AI in a single turn or not. That was already a foregone conclusion.
You could even combine this ZOC control along with one attack per ship per planet. I think that would still be far preferable (to me anyway) than the engine nerfage that keeps me from playing DA.