With players claiming that the AI can be beaten easily with ultra fast ships equipped with mulitple engines, why not create a barrier for those ships? There's plenty of stars in a normal galaxy that are devoid of useful planets and spend the rest of the game as useless eye candy, barring an PQ increase event. Why not create an area around stars that dimishes ship speed as the ships get closer to the stars. With a radaii of 8 squares, the outer square will dimish one point of speed and the next square will be 2 then 4 then 8 etc. If two circles overlap, a corridor will be created with one better speed than normal which can be exploited or guarded with a powerful military base. An attacking fleet may try to run around the base and risk being flanked or attack the base directly to provide better passage for the rest of the invading fleet. This is just an idea so players can create their ultra fast ships but have to suffer some consequences such as sacrificing speed to go around a star.