As a quick question, how difficult would fixing the 16-item limit shortcoming be?
Making it a 17-item limit would be easy; making it arbitrarily large would be extremely hard. Dynamically creating a second button (tab) would be exceedingly painful to implement 
Okay, that's what I figured. Though 17 buttons still wouldn't fully solve the problem - 4 (scout + triangle ships) + 16 (starting bonus ships) + 5 (ARS unlocks) = 25 would be necessary.
Opinionated post is opinionated.
Quite so. BUT one should also be aware that multi-HW games breaks the game in many ways 
Oh, I understand that, but there's a difference between "broken because it is not a balance target and therefore imbalanced" and "broken because of shortcomings of the engine that make ships you've already unlocked disappear." And they
will disappear if core shields are on, because the Class-A shields spawn on the ARS worlds, meaning that those worlds must be captured (capturing the ARS) before the final assault on the AI can proceed. The only question is whether that last ship in your list is one you want to keep or not.
If the game permits a setup (16 HWs in this case), then it should permit it consistently and not break in a non-obvious way.
I don't know if the it is just randomness or intended, but twice now I've done the three way fight as my first nebula.
The first 33% of the fight involves knocking down the minor starbases, but then last 66% consists of the enemy factions focusing at least 75% of the time on fighting other fleets, rather then making runs against a starbase. The result is a bog down in fighting from the various fleets. That 25% that does go straight for the starbase is my starbase. I haven't seen a run from one enemy attacking the other enemy after they both lose their smaller starbases for now 10 minutes, and I don't like it.
I haven't played this scenario enough yet, but my experience is similar. And escorting the ships isn't really an option because
- By the time the first batch of "conversation partners" has been taken care of, there's another group closer to the base that the Zenith ships will stop to chat with, so they never seem to actually get over to the base.
- The Zenith suck at killing off the enemy ships, so some will always slip through, putting the Zenith bases in jeopardy, so I can't escort one group all the way without writing off one (or more) of the bases.
I'm not sure how this could be remedied, but at least figured I'd throw in a "me too."
