The problem is that tactically you generally want a mixed fleet to begin with as long as the different triangle ships are even remotely balanced. Otherwise it wouldn't be a "triangle" to begin with.
In terms of resources, anything about II gets some really inefficient gains.The K cost just makes it worst.
It seems too skewed the other way. It is tactically a good idea to spread your resources. Why, with the resource cost so high, does the k cost have to be so high as well?
I understand the desire to not make the game "samey". But, when homogenous fleets are the way to go, the game gets samey nonetheless, except with the different flavors of specializing in certain units, you get the fleet blobs we get today. Which, ironically, is about as samey you can get.
Right now, you get diminishing returns on ships Mk. III and up with both utility per resource cost AND utility per knowledge cost.
Are you saying that, even though one xor the other is fine, having both just seems unfair and trying to push "variety" too far to the detriment of the game?
Anyways, your point in that trying to enforce variety too much will actually lead to a different "sameyness" is very interesting.
One rule I could imagine is something like a maximum attacker count where small fleetships can't be targeted by more than X enemies simultaneously (let's just say their targeting radars interfere with each other beyond that point or they find it hard to get a clear line of fire), of course with preference going to the ships with the highest DPS against the target. That way sending a blob will not significantly increase your firepower. In other RTSes that mechanic comes naturally because units occupy physical space so only a certain number of units can fit into range at the same time but in AI war you could compress 1000 units into a singularity. Of course then there's still no real risk to massing your forces.
E.g. in Kernel Panic the Bugs are specifically balanced to be weaker in large numbers because they need a clear line of fire to their target and the back ranks couldn't fire (the other factor was that they could convert to highly vulnerable artillery guns that allowed additional bugs to add firepower, a combined force of mobile bugs and artillery could beat an equally sized force of any other faction) while the roughly equivalent Bit worked better in blobs as it didn't need a clear line of fire.
I assume you meant "One rule I could imagine is something like a maximum attacker count where small fleetships can't target the same object by more than X of them at once simultaneously (let's just say their targeting radars interfere with each other beyond that point or they find it hard to get a clear line of fire)"?
This is actually a point I haven't considered. The fact the spacial considerations are "soft" in this game. Where the game does try to keep ships separate, but often times leads to cases units can bunch up together for free for long periods of time, thus letting every ship get optimal firing range.
The reason for this is largely because of performance. Collision "avoidance" by pushing overlapping ships around is expensive, and with the thousands of ships that can be near each other, enforcing this strictly would hurt frame rate way too much. Thus, the game sort of "paces" itself, which can lead to "overlapping stacks" of units lasting for a long time, skewing positional and physical size balance. This is one of those cases where gameplay considerations had to be downplayed somewhat for the sake of performance (and another reason to avoid high ship caps BTW).
