I always keep a few frigates around for auto-resolve but that's just me
I do too. And destroyers. But what if you get in a serious battle? And what if you want to salvage some enemy ships after the battle? Everything other than capitals in your fleet is a handicap. If a serious AI mission comes to crush you with 4 fleets of 50% capitals each, you will regret filling your limited fleet slots with anything other than capitals (and if you win, you will regret filling your fleet to 30 so you can't recover any enemy capitals). Not only will you run out of PPT early and lose without even being able to fight, their fleets will be able to field 180 DP to your 120 DP so you will face defeat in detail every single time, even if you don't face all 4 at once. As it stands, even in 1v1 fleet battles, fielding frigates is a terrible idea because each fleet is limited to 30 slots. So if, say, a fleet with 15 capitals and 15 frigates faces an enemy with 30 capitals, guess who will win? Or a fleet of 30 capitals versus 10 capitals, 10 cruisers, 5 destroyers, and 5 frigates. It's obvious in every case, the fleet size cap simply wrecks the utility of small ships. The only reason to keep small ships around is to take advantage of unrealistic game rules, like it somehow costs less to shoot with your small ships and let them take some damage while keeping your bigger ships silent, compared to just crushing an enemy fleet as fast as possible.
What if your hyperspace speed wasn't determined by the slowest ship in your fleet, but by the average burn speed? Might be a good incentive to add some speedy frigates to your fleet, aye? The Ox already hints at this by increasing your overall burn by 1 but what if it was just an inherent quality of keeping faster ships around?
I doubt it would help enough. It just means less tugs to haul around or no more need to put Augmented Engines on capitals.
Tugs are another thing that just take up slots in your fleet and reduce your combat capability, so I don't use them; I'd rather lose 40 OP for augmented drive field on a Capital than have 4 tugs, which is the equivalent. However, I'm playing a modded game right now with Tiandong. I would absolutely play with their ships primarily (their special is that they ignore speed-reducing space features) if it was averaged. But, as far as I can tell, if you ever recover or buy a single non-Tiandong ship anywhere, you are capped by its speed. I can't fill my fleet with Tiandong ships, since I can't afford to buy them, I can't find them for every role I need, and I almost never recover them in the wild, so that special ability is completely useless to me. But it would actually make the faction viable (IMO) if having mostly their ships would mostly give you the ability to ignore terrain, or basically, speed was averaged.
However, logically, it doesn't make any sense for capitals to go faster when you have a bunch of frigates nearby (not to mention that there is currently no stated reason for frigates to be faster than capitals over long distances, rather than just being more maneuverable [note that on the ocean, longer ships are faster, so absent a justification, that model makes more sense]). It would be nice if tugs gave +2 to ships in sustained burn though.
Honestly, it makes the most sense to me if in combat speed is correlated to ship width/length ratio (since they can have more thrusters) while strategically, speed is correlated to length (if the interstellar speed was capped by something like particle density and cladding like in House of Suns (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Suns)). But either way if big ships are going to be slow in hyperspace I'd like to see a justification for it, as well as a justification for why realspace and hyperspace speeds are linked. Currently combat speed is unrelated to system and hyperspace speeds, which is fine! But system and hyperspace speeds are the same which is a bit odd without any sort of explanation.
