We must be playing very different games. With a flagship of a reasonably competent player helping out, any halfway decently fitted player fleet with some semi-leveled officers and a healthy Technology skill OP bonus (+21% from Technology 7, Computer Systems 7, Mechanical Engineering 7 is entirely sufficient) will be able to easily beat an AI fleet 1.5 times its size with few losses (likely none). No funny exploits (e.g. corner camping) required either, just walk in and punch them till they stop moving.
Add Optimized Assembly and a full suite of combat skills for the player, and that outcome is the expected one for enemy fleets twice the size or larger.
This is true even in DynaSector, let alone vanilla (where half the NPC variants are bad to terrible, and none of them have ever heard of bonus OP).
Also: The DP ratio mechanic gives an actual incentive for the player to get a bigger fleet. Mid-battle replacements are nice and all, but in campaign if you're taking any losses it's already a suboptimal outcome.
Huh, curious... I have several bounties (not sure they are vanilla) that are marked as hard and above, their ships are pretty tough, and when I engage them, DP forces me to basically only bring in half of my fleet. I'm gonna try to raise cap to 500 or more and see how it plays out, but my general playstyle is not having too big fleet and have many junk ships, because I don't rely on AI and it loses ships either way, so in the end I cover my losses much more cheaply. As for my own vessel, I usually sporting nothing bigger than Destroyer, more often Carrier (something like Gemini or Heron), but enemy ships from those bounties are no joke, tear hulls apart left and right.
Seems like main problem here is my attempt at roleplaying too much, but in either case, I don't like the idea of game making you build up huge fleet. If player goes for it, he can still overpower enemy by DP, leaving it at disadvantage and destroying it even easier. Actually current logic of DP backfires a little, on some occasions, smaller fleets than yours get completely smashed by yours, but if DP would be equal, AI still would have a chance taking down at least some of your vessels, so you would have to play more carefully. There are too much occasions when either you or enemy gets completely trashed and it decided basically in the initial engagement just by looking at DP.
On the side note, AI is exploitable, yes, but it is also surprisingly good and sometimes makes some unexpected moves which I might even fail myself, so I don't think we should be discounting it too much.
