I'd turn that on it's head actually - something needs to be done to discourage the player from stacking really high movement. Whether that's a diminishing return from engines, or an end-move-on-attack mechanic is open to debate. 

Oh, and the AI bonus squares thing isn't hard to fix... except that it runs counter to the other bonus detection scheme that's already in use, where it measures adjacency. Besides, the bonus squares are actually fairly meaningless - the very best ones offer +3 levels to an appropriate building built on them, which (in the case of, say, a factory) is +15% industry. This is nothing whatsoever on a planet that can achieve +1000%.

Hey, I'm not saying 'no stacking' or 'one engine module per ship'. But there's no major downside to stacking huge numbers of engines on big hulls. Nothing should be moving 60+ spaces a turn, because that also means it has 60+ ATTACKS per turn, which means you can wipe out the AI's entire fleet in one turn.

I actually like the idea of move-ends-attack more and more for this, but there's a few things which could be done easily to counter it. For example:

* A % movement penalty for bigger hulls, so large or huge hulls need more engines to get the same speed.

* Make engines use up % hull rather than flat mass values - say -10% mass limit for every engine. You'd never be able to get more than 10.

* A diminishing return on engine modules, so that it becomes less powerful the more you already have.

Just as with the economy, players are able to abuse the current system to produce results that are wildly outside what the mechanics can handle.

Because war like that isn't FUN. It's not entertaining to have 1-turn wars. There's no tension. You wipe the enemy out before he can react, which is fun the first time but ultimately reduces the entire warfare game into a chore. And if the AI did it too, we'd have the joyous experience of our best buddy turning on us and destroying all our ships and shipyards before we have a chance to react (an experience you can already enjoy in multiplayer). That's not fun. It involves basically zero strategy or tactics. And judging by the blueprints that the AI relies on, it didn't seem to occur to the devs that people might strap 20 engines on a ship. They seem to have regarded putting 3 on as an outrageously risque design move.

Be honest. What's your win rate in combats? I'd estimate mine, after 500 hours, to be around 99%. I can always pick my battles, and my biggest, baddest fleet can take on 20 other fleets one at a time in a single turn. That was fun the first couple of times, but after that the complete lack of military challenge made every victory a foregone conclusion and felt empty. I can ALWAYS get reinforcements to the front the turn they're built; I can ALWAYS park a fresh, full fleet from the other side of the universe on a damaged one to protect it. It's like the problem that MOO2's turn-base tactical combat always eventually ended up with; the player could just build a mega-fleet that would wipe out any rival before they had a chance to fight back. The result? You never took any casualties ever again, and combat became a chore.

Stuff moves too fast, and it's a big problem. There's no logistical planning required, not the logistics stat that is really 'Fleetcap', but actual supply lines and gathering forces is too easy even on vast maps. That kills military strategy stone dead. You never need to plot a cunning flank attack, because you're just flying your fleet in from whatever direction and killing everything in 1-2 turns. The story you're telling about the Snathi fleets should be viewed as a bad thing, bordering on broken, not a great anecdote about this awesome time that I did this - sure, it'd be a cool thing if that wasn't what happened in EVERY SINGLE WAR. It's not unusual. There's nothing cool or awesome or unique about it. If you just got insanely lucky one time and this one fleet that should have been toast somehow survived against the odds, that's great because you know that 9 times out of 10 it wouldn't have turned out that way. But if it's the same every time, then it causes problems; I run my empire on a military shoestring because I know that every 1 of my ships can kill 10, 100, 1000 times as many of the enemy, simply because I can attack 10 times as often per turn. 

That's why I'm more or less in favour of end-move-on-attack; it gives the AI the chance to react to a war before it's dead, it punishes the player for excessive engine stacking (without preventing him from doing it - you could still make your 198 move constructor, but the temptation to make warships with 50 moves is seriously reduced when they're not using it) and it would just generally be better for the game than keeping really high movement rate and allowing you to attack many times per turn.

No, but insanely high movement rates weren't quite as much of an issue in GC2, either, as the size of the drive components was greater on larger hulls than on smaller ones, and the effective bonus you could get to hull capacity was much more limited (maximum hull capacity bonus was +125% if I'm not mistaken, and there were no component size reductions available). If I recall correctly, a fast endgame warship in GC2 would have had no more than 20-30 actions per turn if it was to remain reasonably useful. That isn't the case in GC3; 20 actions per turn is more like the speed of an average warship in the midgame or so, and map sizes have not grown to the point that the increase in ship speeds is really justified.

This is a really great thread, I hope that it could be addressed by the dev stream this Friday, or by the devs in general in future patches...

Cold War separating Peace and War. One of the things Endless Space/Legend actually have over GalCiv. You can kill anything that invades your ZoC, and so can the enemy, destroying relations, but attacking cities or attacking in enemy ZoC requires a full declaration.

Such diminishing returns work well for sensors, but not so much for engines; Bigger ships can still fit more engines on than smaller ships and so end up faster and with more attacks, making smaller ships even more obsolete than they are already. There's better approaches.

But let's make a separate thread for discussing the engine issue, rather than hijacking this one.

That is kind of the point of a big map though, no? If you want to play a game where you can get ships everywhere in the space of 2-3 turns, play a smaller map size...

But it should play differently on small maps.  It should take forever to get across oversized maps.  It should play differently with each of the parameters you can adjust.  And "balanced" is a fairly subjective term.  The more I see of this question and the more I play with the various settings, the less I am convinced it is actually a problem.

It depends on how game is supposed to be played by majority. Where is a difference between:" we added insane galaxies for marketing reasons and to satisfy that 1% of hardcore players and tried to balance it a little bit" and "our game is next gen of 4X! You are supposed to play huge maps and the whole game is balanced around it". Anyway, it's impossible to balance every galaxy size equally, but right now where is almost no balance at all - some feature simply have no use on larger maps, and others, like stacking, murder gameplay on smaller sizes. 

2 points:

1. Limit the number of attacks by engine type.
1. I really like the idea that Taslios proposed of have an attack limit based on the engine type, rather than the amount of movement left.
2. Don't stack in any way for attacks; if you have level 0 engines you get 1 attack; if you have one each of levels 0-4, you still only get 5 attacks
3. Nice way to encourage research on the movement tree, even if the new engine tech doesn't give a direct speed boost
2. Add penalties to both tactical speed and hit probabilities for any ship with "excess" engines
1. Think Star Destroyer vs a Star Fury (which can spin on a dime)
2. One way to introduce a few more tactical decision opportunities
3. Would give even more weight to carriers, who bring the mass of small, maneuverable escorts and interceptors to a fight, rather than ponderous, behemoths that turn like a barn and are about as hard to hit as one.

Last I knew, you were as guilty of building sensor boats as the worst of us.  

I hope you don't nerf stacking too badly, I am having fun with a combined survey/sensor boat (with escorts) for dual anomaly claiming and border exploration.  It's not an extreme sensor stack compared to how some folk do it, but it makes me feel clever.    I have had fun with engine stacking after getting a couple of double-your-speed events, one of which I bankrupted myself badly to get.  I had a special transport with a 70 move factor.  I finally could keep my transports out of range of the enemy!!  To me, these occasional extremes, if they can be kept occasional, are the true heart of enjoying GalCiv.  "Hey!  Look what I did!"