A new rule has been put in place that prevents more than 10 flagships of not-including-you being in a battle at any given time, for performance reasons. However, any flagships that WOULD have been in the battle instead come in waves as others die. This keeps the scale/difficulty, without making it so that your CPU dies a fiery death.
Not having CPU murder is great, but battles feel rather sparse now. Also, it seems to make Mercenary Hotline very weak (battle is full so newcomer's flagships can't spawn).
Could it be changed to 5 or more ships for each race in the battle, perhaps less one for each other non-Hydral race already participating?
* Made some adjustments to the flagship-staggering logic such that:
** Any flagship that was previously visible won't become hidden over the course of a battle. So, for instance, ships that get called in later, like the mercenary hotline, will always appear properly.
** The cap of flagships is normally still 10, or it is 3 times the number of sides, whichever is greater. So if there are 5 sides, the max is actually 15.