This particular capability is provided in the exploration tree. I would like to remove it, or even better to assign that capacity to high end engines.



As is, the entire tactical aspects of having open border agreements and controlling choke points is lost in this game as someone can simply fly around you. If such a thing were put onto a heavy tonnage item like the high end engines then I could see it as you have to pay a trade off in less defensive/offensive capabilities in order to have that capacity (making it good for scouting and quick guerrilla strikes).



If that's not really possible then I would like to simply mod that capacity out of my local games even if it makes that particular tech item useless.



Anyone have any ideas on where I might find this within the XML's? And any thoughts on if this is going to completely break route planning/ai by removing it?

Looking at the files, I would say it should not break the route planning.















That is the base movement descriptor. Notice the value is 0. If you set all the later freemovement values to 0 also, I think it should work fine. I will try it later myself later since I was one of the people who do not like offroading from a strategic point of view.

At first glance I thought those were "bonus" move applied to races. The "offroading" is caused by a tech. But I'll give that a try too.

Setting them to 0 does work just fine. What it seems to do is the router tries to find the fastest route. Since going offroad takes, literally, forever, it will never choose that over going the other way. I have tried to force it to go offroad, but even with the most advanced movement tech, it will not even take the input. So yeah, set all the of the movementfreemove values to 0 and offroading goes away.