I am now at turn 49 and, using my modified Stargazer probes, I have explored the edges of all of the sectors. The universe looks like the first screen snapshot below. I own the sector on the left and my 3 opponents each own a sector to the right and no civ owns the top sector, although I have exclusive access to it and am developing it. My sector has 2 subspace gates on the right-hand side - the "top" one and the "bottom" one.
When I zoom in on the bottom subspace gate, it looks like the second screen snapshot below. The Iconians, who declared war on me about 10 turns ago, have a single ship sitting on the Subspace Gate. As shown in the third screen snapshot below, the ship is a command ship named Ringvault. The reason the Ringvault is sitting there just waiting to be destroyed is that the AI doesn't seem to know what to do when it gets across the substream only to find that all cells surrounding the Subspace Gate are occupied by me. So instead of using its remaining moves to go back to safety across the substream, it just sits there.
As the game progresses, I have found the the AI civs will stack-up many probes, constructors, colony ships, and freighters just waiting for a path to open up for them to proceed to wherever the AI thinks they should be going. When war is declared, I can easily destroy all of the ships sitting on the Subspace Gate.
I have 3 possible suggestions for correcting this behavior:
- Modify the "movement" logic to recognize whether or not it will be possible to move past the Subspace Gate BEFORE entering the Subspace Gate at the other end and, if the civ owning the ship is not at war with the civ(s) that own the blocking ships, do not enter the Subspace Gate. Instead find another target.
- If the AI civ is at war with whoever is blocking further movement at the Subspace Gate, allow them to traverse to the blocked Subspace Gate, attack one or more of the blocking ships or fleets, then retreat back across the Subspace Stream.
- Move the Subspace Gates farther into the sector so that 6 cells would have to be blocked instead of just the 3, 4, or 5 now.
