  We find an interesting interplay between the range of the attractive part of
the interaction potential and the extent of metastability (as measured by
supersaturation) in gas-liquid nucleation. We explore and exploit this
interplay to obtain new insight into nucleation phenomena. Just like its
dependence on supersaturation (S), the free energy barrier of nucleation is
found to depend strongly on the range of the interaction potential. Actually,
the entire free energy surface, F(n), where n is the size of the liquid-like
cluster, shows this dependence. The evidences and the reasons for this strong
dependence are as follows. (i) The surface tension increases dramatically on
increasing the range of interaction potential. In three dimensional
Lennard-Jones system, the value of the surface tension increases from 0.494 for
a cut-off of 2.5 {\sigma} to 1.09 when the full range of the potential is
involved. In two dimensional LJ system, the value of the line tension increases
from 0.05 to 0.18, under the same variation of the potential range. (ii) The
density of the gas phase at coexistence decreases while that of the liquid
phase increases substantially on increasing the range of the interaction
potential. (iii) As a result of the above, at a given supersaturation S, the
size of the critical nucleus and the free energy barrier both increase with
increase in the range of interaction potential. (iv) Surprisingly, however, we
find that the functional form predicted by the classical nucleation theory
(CNT) for the dependence of the free energy barrier on the size of the nucleus
to remain valid except at the largest value of S studied. (v) The agreement
between CNT prediction and simulated values of the barrier is supersaturation
dependent and worsens with increase in the range of interaction potential, and
increases above 10 kBT at the largest supersaturation that could be studied.
