If i adjust the space in a given hull size will the AI be able to take advantage of teh increased space? And if an engine is twice the size will the AI be able to adjust to this? What if the engine sizes are reduced in hull space? Will the Ai know to use the extra space for other things? Can the AI even make its own custom ships?

I ask because in my goal to monkey around with making the 18x18 map feel much larger i have tried to reduce the ranges and speeds of starships. In the process of experiementation I have found that I can adjust speeds but only limitedly. I want to reduce speed by 1/2 but the game only deals with integers. So my goal of reducing speeds by 1/2 wont work. So i want to double the engine sizes for speed 1 engines, while this isn't ideal it does simulate a speed 0.5 engine.

So this is how things appear to be shapping up for simulating speeds at 1/2 normal

First no tech gives a bonus to speed.

With engines speeds that are originally 1 I've had to double the engine size to simulate speed 0.5

Engine speeds 2 are simply reduced to 1

Engines speeds of 3 can't be reduced to 1.5 so I reduced them to 1 and reduce the size of the engine to 2/3. Providing the same ratio of hull space to speed.

Engine speeds of 4 are now 2.

Engines speeds of 5 are now 3. The reasoning for this is that I have removed all teh speed bonuses from the tech tree and now speeds are a base of 1 for the hull size and engines only. The top of the line engine gets a boost to 3 to compensate for the missing speed bonuses.

The major difficulty is how the AI will react to these changes. With a doubling of the size of the lvl 1 engines i have effectly made those engines unusable for the smaller hull sizes. But i will have to increase the Hull sizes for tiny and small by 50% just to be able to use an engine and make the medium hulls 20% larger. The large, huge and cargo hulls wil remain unchanged. Again it comes down to how will the Ai react?