I'm totally jumping the gun on Beta 4, but I've been thinking a lot about combat since the stream on Friday. I think the way they were struggling to put together a good looking battle pointed to one thing that needs to be improved to take advantage of the new battle viewer and ship roles: we need larger fleets. A few ships ramming into each other will not be that interesting either visually or strategically. I don't know the technical roadblocks, but I think that it is clear that the more different ships with different roles we have interacting, the more fun combat will be both from a fleet planning and a combat watching perspective. With that in mind, here is my 3 step plan to get better fleets earlier.
1) More logistics. First step to building bigger, more interesting fleets is to allow us to group more ships together.
2) Cheaper ships. Next step to building bigger fleets is to make building ship easier and quicker.
3) Let shipyards build multiple ships in one turn. Even with cheap ships, the 1 ship/turn limit will make assembling large and interesting fleets long and tedious. How much better would it be if you could just pump out 10 tiny ships in one turn?