I'm just starting out with this mod, really enjoy it so far. I'm wondering do you guys enjoy playing with Free Warp on or off? I really like the idea of free warp lore wise and even gameplay wise, my only issue I ran into in my first game was that the free warp combined with very slow sublight/warp speed of this mod created a situation where I was chasing AI ships all over the place much more than in normal Stellaris.

I know the AI is kinda garbage in Stellaris anyway so there probably isn't much that could be done about it in the mod, the only way the game manages to increase difficulty is by nerfing the player/buffing the AI resource generation and other things, not because the AI is ever any smarter (that is just my impression at least).

What happened in my game was I entered a defensive pact with some little trading empire, I forget the name (not the bug looking people). In any case they only had 1 system and I had several defensive pacts with other nations so I thought I was safe. What happened was :) The romulans declared war on the tiny empire, just bringing me into war with them. The Breen also joined through I assume some alliance or war invitation from the Romulans. My defensive partners remained neutral though, because I was pulled into the war from a 3rd party empire to them. Thus I was fighting a 2 front war against the Romulans and the Breen. Even though my ships were superior and I won many battles, they would instantly overtake any planets basically even though they had no army transports and I had strongholds on every planet for crew.

Fine, whatever. My biggest problem was with how FAST they would conquer any planet without any dropships and they would free warp in god knows what direction afterwards to repeat the task, it would take sometimes 3 systems for my fleet to catch them even though they were just 1 system behind. I GUESS I could have fought better by spamming pause and trying to determine where they were headed and trying to route them off a different way, but that would basically result in 2-3 systems or more getting conquered while I cut them off anyway. The game says my "tech is superior to theirs" pretty vague but I had high impulse drives and singularity drives, I think I should have been faster than them and probably was. It's just once you enter a warp lane you are stuck there travelling, often I would enter the lane and they would change direction or go where I just was and I was stuck waiting to arrive before issuing another order.

TLDR: Do you guys use Free Warp or no and if so do you not get tired of chasing the AI all over due to slow ship speed? I'd prefer to use free warp but it doesn't seem worth the hassle based on my first experience.