In AIW2, the proposal is to turn a "full cap" of ships into a squad instead. A squad, as I understand it, basically behaves as a single unit... just that visually it can be a couple hundred ships.
One of the main time sinks in AIW is, after your fleet gets decimated, waiting for your ships to get rebuilt and then waiting for them to get from your factories to your fleet. It's even more annoying when your reinforcements get intercepted en route and then you have to wait longer to rebuild them. The 'long route' was kind of solved by "star gates". Of course, it's not *really* a time sink. The AI could use the time to launch a counterattack against your worlds, for example. However, it's entirely possible to sit there for five, ten, fifteen minutes waiting for your shipyards and engineers to crank through rebuilding three thousand ships and five starships.
So, I propose that, in certain conditions, squads get to automatically reinforce to max strength as long as resources are available. Any on-going combat in the local area automatically prevents such reinforcement. This also doesn't affect huge singleton units, as the loss of a capital ship should be a major event requiring manual intervention.
1) Hostile territory - no auto rebuild
2) Hostile territory, mobile factory present - slow rebuild (e.g. 4 minutes)
3) Neutral territory - slow rebuild (4 minutes)
4) Neutral territory, mobile factory present - medium rebuild (3 minutes)
5) Friendly territory - medium rebuild (3 minutes)
6) Friendly territory, factory of any kind present - fast rebuild (2 minutes)
There might even be a special planet which adds a further bonus to rebuild time.
Of course, if you lose a bunch of ships in hostile territory, the AI will get a counter attack of some kind (similar to a reprisal wave). Meanwhile, the AI, in the place you just attacked, would get one or two rounds of reinforcement as well. Reinforcement would get priority over new ship construction, but you could manually stop the reinforcement of a particular squad or squads if you so wished. The numbers could, of course, be tweaked as well. The mobile factory is a weak, slow, expensive unit that you'd want to take great care to protect. The idea here is to reduce the micromanagement and waiting time of rebuilding your fleet while still keeping some kind of penalty for taking a bath.
