Saw this in Lurchi's mod thread and thought it would be a great idea for your mod as well since the AI really struggles with Pre-Warp games!
ORIGINAL: NephilimNexus
Suggestion for improving the pre-warp stage:
#1) Drop the Warp Bubble speed from 2000 down to 500 and make it an even bigger energy hog.
#2) Place a new type of warp engine between the Warp Bubble and the Gerax Hyperdrive, with the old Warp Bubble stats and research cost.
#3) Make the research cost on the new Warp Bubble really cheap, so it can be learned in a year or less.
What this does:
It let's players get entry level warp tech faster than before, but does so in a way that still almost completely restricts them to their home system. Thus it extends the pre-warp tier while making it more interesting, as ships will now have enough speed to build mining bases in your home system, even if they lack the fuel to go beyond it.
See, the drag of the pre-warp phase is two things: Waiting forever for the basic Warp Bubble (which is way overpriced in vanilla), and the tedious drag of trying to get your initial mining bases built with ships that can barely do a speed of 20. This solves both of those problems, as it makes the first step of warp cheap & quick to access, which in turn lets you get into building up your home system faster. It is balanced by the severely limited range that probably won't get you to even the next system over unless you overload your ships with fuel tanks, which in turn makes them useless anyway.
The regular Warp Bubble isn't removed per se, it's name gets changed & it stats instead are simply moved up a notch so players still do have to learn it. This extends the research timeline a little, but that's okay because now people won't get bored with it.
