[dmm]

Mephisto, you may be right but that isn't what the earlier Posts to this thread are saying so I think you are wrong. NORMALLY, you'd be right because NORMALLY you establish contact with an empire as soon as you encounter one of their ships, since NORMALLY there is some path between the two empires (which is how your ships encountered each other). Note that "contact" does not imply a treaty. It just means that diplomats from one of A's colonies could, in principle, travel to one of B's colonies.

What the Posts below are saying is that if a ship from A somehow encounters a ship from B when there is no connecting path between empires then "contact" is not established. No big problem so far. The claimed bug is, that the AI ignores ships from empires with which it has no "contact" regardless of their actions. So they can wipe out colonies, build bases and lay mines on homeworlds, prey on colonizers and transports, etc. and never get treated as enemy vessels.

Someone else should try to verify this. Also, find out if fleets of a contacted empire become "cloaked" by cutting their empire's contact path to an AI. Given the AI's demonstrated lack of memory, I bet they do.

[edit: Of course you are right about the system grav. shield facility. There's almost no way to overcome a "turtle" is there? You can't force your way in and you can't use intel because there's no contact. Your only hope is a random event that "cracks the shell", but you wouldn't know that it occurred so how could you take advantage of it?]

[ 21 February 2002: Message edited by: dmm ]