@EverfreeEmergencies
Oh, I HATE that shit. It’s my only significant gripe with Emperor of the Fading Suns. The AI doesn’t need resources AT ALL. If they have the tech for a unit and the right city type to produce it, they can. Which makes it almost impossible to keep up with them on the very important front of spaceship construction in the early game, because they require a significant quantity of an extremely rare natural resource to produce a single jump core for, and most ships require multiple cores (the largest needs five). It also requires more than a dozen technologies to even get started producing the
weakest ships. You speed up research by building more labs. And the city-building unit is expensive. And labs require significant funds to function. So the enemy is pumping out engineers for free and spamming labs that run for free to research the tech for spaceships which they then churn out for free. And those engineers notably require a fair bit of food to produce, which you’ll be struggling to produce a surplus of early on.
Speaking of food, it also means that their cities & units cannot starve regardless of whether you set food consumption on or off. I spent YEARS trying and failing to trigger outbreaks of plague on their worlds by wiping out their farm cities from space. I only learned of this AI cheating a few
months ago. I’ve been playing it for a little over
20 years. You can maybe imagine how I felt that evening.
Fortunately the AI in EFS is borderline braindead. Which is
why they gave it those cheats.