Its pretty much as everyone says, adding a larger ship cap isn't really going to help the game. There are many people who will not be able to run the game if the ship cap was increased. Also in multi-player games with 6 or more players the game already drastically slows down which would make this feature pointless. My suggestion to you is mod your game. I think there is already a mod out that allows you to do this so please stop asking for this and let the good developers of stardock and ironclad focus on more important stuff like balancing and minidumps crashes.

Like I said tactics, you can not take over a number of star systems with out help and tactics. I myself hate politics but this is fun. think outside the battle. politics and insurgencies.

And my only contention is that this game should have more than one way to win, building the same static planet over and over and altering how you finish the game instead of continuing to expand how you got to that point seems a bit silly to me. Also vs. a human opponent, having this troop limitation on a large or huge map would just give you too many holes in their defenses to exploit.

I'm not complaining, but I do think this is something that should be looked at / addressed.

I think the expansion will make all of us a little happier, though I'm not sure what they'll do with it yet.

NapalmEnema This question came up before and in response the large fleet option was added, it's not a perfect solution but it has made things a fair bit better, imagine being in the position you are right now but with half the fleet it was next to impossible. Unfortunately due to the fact that maps can be up scaled to absolutely massive sizes it has just postponed the issue.

Don't bother with the fleet size scales with number of planets owned or population this has been tried and argued to death, bottom line is that this messes up the early game balance horribly and removes strategic early game options like going for a terran fast or capturing a choke point early.

I figure they have Three choices for an official non mod fix that may resolve it, that may be viable according to the other threads I've read on this.
1) Tick box on the map start screen that enables fleet cap removal once you research the last fleet tech, players with low spec machines should not join those games. (Simple and easy and my favorite Idea)
2) Fleet size can be scaled with map size, the bigger the maps the more massive the fleets you can have (Second favorite option)
3) Leave fleet cap the same and introduce Garrison ships, ships that do not take up fleet capacity but are not jump capable, you pay money to maintain them instead and make them all Corvette class or something like that. Due to cost maintenance you can't spam them everywhere to make yourself unattackable, they can't jump so you cant attack with them, but you can use them to help hold a choke point or vunerable systems. (This one is not perfect and I'm sure it will cause unforeseen problems and abuses which is why option 1 is my preferred choice, however the idea of new ships is just to nice an idea to ignore this one)

Of the above options I think 1 and 2 are the most likely as they are easy to implement and a quick patch would do it and fix the not having enough fleet on really large maps permanently. Option three is alot of work and more of a mini expansion and I probably should not have mentioned it, but the idea was to cool to omit.

I think 1 is ideal and 2 is viable.

Good suggestions, and I can see you understand what I am talking about with regards to a larger strategy.

Regards

along with larger fleets on larger maps with mutiple stars, i'd also like to be able to assign a home planet for each system, or at the higher fleet caps get multiple home planets. the current system really doesnt scale for more then one star.

Multiple home planets has been dealt with as well,
You have 40 planets in each system and you place your capital near the center but the edge planets have horrible loyalty and corruption reducing your income from these planets to a pittance. You then take another star system with 40 planets and because of the two extra jumps (You moved your capital to right beside the star right?) the edge planets in your new star system are revolting and getting hit by pirates all the time right?

The common agreement appears to be that star systems should not have more than 25 or so bodies in them as well it's just kind of silly for a star system to be that big. This means your home system will have decent enough loyalty due to distance and your new star systems will have the extra two jumps meaning they won't be the most loyal planets but they should not be causing problems every fin min.

In short when making maps don't go above 25 bodies per star (20 is better) and you can have as many stars are you like, excluding the whole fleet shortage issue on the really really huge maps.

I've won many 5-star huge randoms, with situations ranging from just 1 unfair AI to a mix of 5 unfair and hard ai. Using tactical structures is key. You can hold grav wells for a long time if you have a good tactical config.
Also, vasari and advent are easier to play on larger maps, due to advents low supply costs and vasari fleet mobility. with vasari, you want a phase stab in every grav well almost, and with advent, the hanger upgrades make those really potent defenses.

But i agree that we need larger fleet cap

Winning huge maps against 9 hard AI can and has been done, it's just that after a set point it starts to become a grind.
With 9 AI I usually wipe out the first 2 fairly quickly and just when I'm finishing off the third or fourth it starts to get tricky.
You cannot effectively defend all your front line planets and attack at the same time as one or two AI's are going to attack while your away and you either retreat and deal with it of press your attack and take two planets and then return and recapture your recently lost planet. But of course one of your two recently acquired planets will be recaptured before you can get back, someone described it as two steps forward and one step back procedure. If your smart you can get all the military tech much faster than the AI and this helps as you can split your fleet and take two enemy fleets at the same time. But eventually the AI catches up on tech and that gets tricky.
Near the end I spam lots of nova cannons and just kill all his pop, it cuts out the grind but it's not really a satisfying win.

What I ultimately want to see this game become is what it has the potential to become. An almost infinitely scalable universe with the potential for massive numbers of players. Imagine a Map with over 5000 planets and 200 players thats the kind of scale I want to see possible. Ok that game would take weeks if not months to finish and good luck finding a system that could run it but 5-10 years down the line that kind of hardware is not impossible. Anyway enough of the dreaming, the option for even larger fleets, I want them please.

thats insane. especially if you have dark fleets incoming. you'd have to go around and turn all the returning armadas of just to keep your comp from crashing and Vasari would be well favored in a game like that. You would drown in your own ships.

As an alternative, would it make sense to dynamically scale the fleet size based on map size?

Thus a smaller maps have lower fleet size vs large maps with high fleet size...?

That's certainly a viable solution, I think on a random huge or large with multiple star systems 4-6k ships would be workable, more wouldn't hurt.