That could be one of its behavioral settings I'd guess. It takes over when you drop, and proceeds to scuttle all of your base defenses, buys and sells on the BM, until your broke, negates all of your treaties, and scatters your fleet to the furthest corners of the galaxy (if the ships survive the journey)
i'll add to this, and say that the visual effect of the smaller ships jumping in, and the heavies rooling in behind em just looks really immpressive. take the rebel attack on the second death star in return of the jedi, for example. all of the starfighter-scale ships arrived at the rally point first, and then BAM, a mon cal pops in behind em. its a high coolness factor for me to have that kind of a show of force.
That's a good idea, I like it. Wonder if the Devs kicked that around the table at some point. I've always been an advocate to giving players the tools they need to screw themselves over, cuz people like the ability to make a choice, no matter how it turns out in the end.
not only is this common pirate behavior, but the pirates are an easy way to win the game, if you can last long enough. just pump up the bounties on all of the other players, and let them do the work for you. you don't even have to leave your home system, just build defenses good enough to sit there and wait everyone else out.
I agree on the AM jumping cost limiting the range of how far ships can travel. That option was put into use in Masters Of Orion 2, and it worked out very well IMHO. You could send any fleet to any star in range (provided there were no anomalies to get in the way), and the opposing team could bring in a fleet from somewhere (if no ships were present) to counter-punch. In Star Wars: Rebellion, there was no distance limit for ships. anyone could go anywhere, at any time, and hopefully
