About that hard cap on fleet size, why not limit the fleet by max crew? That would naturally balance the fleet composition: if the cap is at 2000 you can only have a couple a Capitals... Though that's a lot of frigates! Okay it would require to re-balance the crew complements, but since they do not consume supplies anymore they are mostly there for flavor now: take the old FP, multiply by 10 and voilĂ , you have a balanced skeleton crew requirement!
Another suggestion from DR was to use a ship size weight like 1/1/2/3/5 so a 25 fleet size would translate to 25 frigates or 5 capitals, witch is somewhat close to the current values without the Logistic Rating tedium.
A soft limit would be nice for consistency with the cargo/crew limits and to avoid the mechanic feeling "gamey" or arbitrary.
As for the hard coded limit, I can see the UI problems, but also its a bit odd that you can have 25 fighter wings or 25 paragons. This is quite different. I like the soft limit idea. If your fleet gets big enough, don't you run into the problem of Xerxes' giant army drinking rivers dry? Where would you get enough supplies for a really big fleet? This is what keeps most armies from getting too large. Speed, stealth, and emergency burn penalties also seem logical at some point, perhaps even more so than maintenance costs (which would realistically decrease with scale)
Well - the 25 limit is not supposed to be something that normally comes into play. (For now, I'm excluding the "you're obliterating everything" phase of the game from "normally", since that part is pretty broken, balance-wise. You'd still be able to obliterate everything anyway, just in a slightly different way.)
If it does end up being something the player bumps into more often, or if it ends being necessary to use as a tool to control player fleet sizes, then I can definitely see bringing in a simpler form of a soft limit, or even just bumping it up a bit. But unless this limit really takes an active role in gameplay, I don't think making it more fancy is a good idea.
What about missions? Aren't they based on DPs? They are very fun as set-piece battle designed challenges, which campaign sadly lacks. If campaign gets storyline/branched set-piece designed battles as part of campaign missions (which it should), then we could wave goodbye to normal missions without too much sadness.
What about the "Battle size" preference, which is based on DP, right? I'm uncomfortable with that preference, since it allows player to manipulate combat and reduce it to soloing 1v1 a trickle of the AI ships. It undercuts modders/content designers trying to make specific encounters, battles, or set-pieces, if the size of the battle can be altered by the player.
All these use the recovery cost instead. This does alter the balance of some missions a good bit, with capital ships being around 2x more expensive.
As far as battle size, it's there for performance reasons. The lower limit can't allow the player to solo AI ships 1-1, it's not low enough for that (and is going up to 250 in this release). That said, if you're using a lower battle size while your computer can handle the default value, you're basically cheating
Can anyone say what sensor profile is?
It's a measure of how easy a ship is to detect. The sensor profile of all ships in the fleet is added up to get the fleet's sensor profile. This, together with the sensor strength of another fleet, is used to determine the range at which the other fleet can see this one.