Not sure if this is working or not. Okay 95% of the time it seems to work as advertised. But there are maybe 5% of cases where the enemy shoots back in the first round. Almost always, in the one game I am trying this in, there are 0 damage done so same difference. However there is at least one case where I got jumped by a ship I presume coming off a planet and it actually attacked 'first'. I got to shoot back but meantime one of my ships died in the one round of combat as I destroyed the bushwhacker in the first round.
Is this supposed to only be in effect when 'attacking' or should it be in effect all the time?
Note that near as I can tell the AI does not deal with a human 'Super Warrior' well at all. If the bonus only applies when attacking it missed several chances to wipe me out by attacking me and let me just whittle away at two stacks of 30 or so 5-ship fleets (that is about 300 ships, like half the Drengin navy) over the course of three turns just following the stacks and taking a bunch of 1 movement point attacks. Thanks to the weaponry and lack of defense almost every attack by each weapon killed a ship. Luckily for the other races the Arceans are so crippled by their lack of speed at start that it seldom matters so much (I confess I am using a custom race created in the lack of that feature for the beta by modding the xml file). Then again, I recall saying something like this about the AI military in general after one other game then getting absolutely trounced the next time (though more by military production than by naval, er, astro, tactics), so stand by on that one.