Ow, my remark had NOTHING to do with the recent financial difficulties. Sorry if it came over that way.
I gotcha, sorry for misunderstanding.
I was simply suggesting that you'd be able to widen your market potential if the game became a tad more accessible. I know word of mouth is universally positive, heck, I'm even a contributor (also bought tons of gift versions 
, but you should also know that the people who enjoy a niche (dunno, is it niche?) game like this will speak louder then those who don't. Anyway I didn't mean anything bad by it, I just want this game to attrack more people, so I wonder what parts could use improvements to achieve that goal, that's all 
I think that by the time something like that becomes an issue, we've already lost the players you're thinking of. The people that are part of that "wider audience" barely make it
to the intermediate tutorial, let alone
through it, from what I've seen. Seriously. It just doesn't appeal to them on any level in most cases: often they don't even try to download the demo.
That's not to say that the game should then be obscure because it might as well be, but what you're referring to is the core hook that gets most people who enjoy the game into it (the whole AI Progress thing, making long-term decisions count, etc, was the thing most praised in reviews and by a lot of players).
Anyway, I see where you're coming from, but I think that what you're describing there is sort of inevitable for a game like this: you can lose slowly if you don't know what you're doing, or stray outside the normal bounds. Of course, with a game like this you can also recover a situation like that, which is pretty awesome to do, as you noted. I think the biggest wave of ships I've ever lived through is 13k, and those were mark III, not mark V. It's definitely a great feeling.
And note I'm not saying you didn't know what you were doing, as your way of playing is entirely valid: you weren't losing, you were just making it more grindy. The 9k ships thing was because of the rules changes, not anything you directly did in the course of your game.
See, but that's not what I consider blobbing. You've got three different fleets you use in different places, only occasionally combining them together. That's exactly the sort of thing I'm trying to encourage. To me, "blobbing" means taking every mobile military ship that you and/or your team can muster, and just flying them all around in one group all the time. That ain't cool
It can work like that on lower difficulties, but as the AI ratchets up it's maximum ships in one spot, the player necessarily must as well. If you could get a way for the AI to not have bigger blobs as difficulty rises, then it could potentially become more time-effective for the player to split since it won't be necessary to have all your fleet in one spot all the time the whole game. Right now that really only happens in a few rare defensive edge cases. Offense is 100% full blob every time in higher difficulties just due to the way the difficulty scaling works.
True, that is something where you have to have your fleet as more of a group on the higher difficulties. I'm not really sure how to combat that in particular. I think in those cases it becomes more about anticipating the AI, and moving your fleet accordingly.
I think you all misunderstood me about universal ship caps. I didn't mean 500 fighter mk1s or 500 spire starships. I meant that every ship has a "capacity" cost and you can spend knowledge to upgrade it through the game. 50-cap ships on low might have 1 capacity cost, and bomber starships would have 20 or so etc. You would start with 250 capacity so you can build 50 bombers+50 frigates+50 fighters and then some starships, or just 250 bombers and can improve it with research. The knowledge costs would need some rebalancing and stuff though of course. Maybe the capacity could be tied to planet count so by the end you could be running attacks against multiple planets with split fleets instead of requiring your entire fleet to be engaged in every single offensive or defensive battle because you hit near your maximum power so very quickly for the most part in this game.
I knew that's what you meant, and I also feel it don't work at all. I've written about it at length in blog posts in the past, but it basically boils down to finding one killer combo of units and just spamming them forevermore. In every game I've ever played with a global cap like that, there was some sort of killer combo that would work in most cases against the AI.
Age of Empires III is my most recent example of that: with french, just build musketeers and their best horsemen, and that's all you need to do if your economy is strong enough. And actually, in many cases you can cut out the horsemen and just spam musketeers. Occasionally you will also want a siege weapon or to, but that's mostly for trashing the opponent's fortresses and/or towns after you've trashed their military in the open field or on your own walls, etc. Granted this is against the AI, not against other humans, so I'm sure that wouldn't hold up in PVP.
But I'm wholly against any sort of global ship caps like that, I've just played too many games of the sort and don't find the mechanic to be sound, although there are certain advantages, as with anything.
