Dacarnix wrote:It would be nice if ships in Refit weren't ignored entirely for that calculation. They're still ships in your fleet.
Another primary weakness of many AIs in 4Xes is failure to assess economic strength's translation to military strength. AIs frequently decide you are militarily pathetic even when your industrial might is many times his, and fail to calculate that in the amount of turns it would take his forces to actually cause any major damage, you would be able to turn out a fleet several times his size, resulting in a situation where he is inevitably doomed like Japan against the USA, except without any of the concerns that would justify attacking you in the first place, nor any plan to sue for peace before the inevitable happens.
Aside from lacking a grand strategic plan in the first place, which is an issue for another time, it might potentially be sensible to calculate exactly how many forces could potentially be brought to bear, factoring in economic might and travel time to the front. If a guy can rush-buy more than your twice entire empire's worth in warships and put them on the front within 2 turns, it's probably not a good idea to attack him when it's going to take you 4 turns just to reach his most remote border colony. Which will be swarming with said warships by the time you get there.
Well, if we assume the AI has access to the "graphs", representing the nebulous efforts of their intelligence agencies, the obvious answer is that ships in refit should still be included in your military power.sven wrote:There's a bit of a realism issue here: in theory the AI should be subject to fog of war effects when doing these sorts of relative power comparisons. In practice, they're not, but I guess if we're going to give them a fog of war exception in this case, they should probably "see" ships under refit just as well as they can "see" all your other military assets.
On the other hand, it IS a legitimate strategy to exploit an opening created by someone putting most of their ships inoperable for an extended period of time...the operative term being an EXTENDED period of time. If those ships are going to exit refit well before your attacking force causes any real damage, this is as bad an idea as the above.
Perhaps, as a general practice of the AI in general, it should not prematurely declare war to begin with, but rather, should act as if it as at war, and make the necessary troop movements, and only formally declare war when it is finally executing a maneuver that would be detected and clearly recognizable by you, like warping to your colonies. If, at any point, the plan turns sour, the AI can then just chicken out.
So in this scenario, the AI would see your fleet strength plummet, and decide he is going to attack you. So he enters "war" mode and begins moving his forces into position to attack AS IF he was at war, but not having declared war yet. Then, if the military strength strength returns, he will simply call the entire thing off, "Whoops, no, that was just an exercise, a totally benign military exercise, not an attack on you at all, yup, yup."
This will also probably improve warfighting in general, since the AI will then only declare war when he is actually prepared to ATTACK, instead of declaring war with no mobilization plan out of pure dislike for you and then finding out that you can mobilize faster than he can and thus the war beginning with him on the back foot already, despite it being his idea.
Because let's face it: Immediately being on the defensive in a war you started is just sad.
