I did a brief search for anyone who had similar suggestions and didn't find much, so apologies in advance if I'm repeating anyone.
After my first real full playthrough of Nexerelin I found myself with almost 1/3rd of the default maximum ship count taken up by tugs, and while that's largely to me being stubborn and refusing to drop below burn speed 9, I find it mildly displeasing that it's required to have a number of these ships for larger fleets when they're entirely useless outside of their single purpose, and that being one that's entirely forgettable once you purchase a tug.
The two suggestions I have are fairly similar and give them a bit of application in combat;
- Tugs could grab disabled friendly ships for 100% guaranteed recovery, allowing you to have more control over losing some of your more precious ships
- They could also be tasked with retrieving disabled hostile ships for a 100% boarding chance, which would be useful for nabbing any sort of specialty or rare ship that might've caught your eye.
These alone would probably be fairly overpowered as you could capture or recover just about any disabled ship on the field given enough tugs, so a few balancing possibilities would be to have tugs recovering ships have a huge CR cost, or just have a hard limit on the number of ships you can recover with tugs. Another balancing factor could be that larger disabled ships require more tugs to move at reasonable speeds, not to mention putting a tug / several tugs out in combat is a huge risk considering how flimsy they are, recovery operations would have to be well defended.
The main drawbacks I feel this could have are that it would likely conflict with the system of capturing and recovering disabled ships currently in the game quite a lot, plus this could potentially remove the more punishing aspect of losing expensive or rare ships if you're equipped well enough to recover them. Just because a ship isn't fully destroyed doesn't necessarily mean it would be anything worth salvaging.
Also I've got an entirely unrelated question and not really a suggestion as it has to do with boarding during combat, but would implementing it as a basic command like all the other combat orders be a possibility? It'd probably take way too much tweaking to be viable but I thought I'd ask.
