(this is a repost from the .96.1a patchnotes in case you missed it)
Hey Alex, I was wondering if you could add a combat feature that would be more in depth regarding ships deploying order in relative to their strength.
In really large battles I noticed that there are 2 ways to deploy your ships; the smaller/faster ones first or the second option, deploy the largest ships first followed by the smaller ships last. As of right now the game only does the first option but after a lot of testing I have found that doing the later tends to bring the larger ships closer to the front line faster and it drastically changes how the battle unfolds.
That said the reason why I would like to ask you to add a feature is that I think it would be nice if you had the option pre-battle to select if you want to deploy large dp ships first or small dp firsts. And I think where it could be a massive game changer is if the AI could also do that randomly through a simple value given the the npc fleet or it could be a faction doctrine to begin with. That said fleets that tend to deploy a lot of carriers of phase ships benefit massively from deploying smaller ships first while ships containing mostly battleships benefit the most from deploying large battleships first.
It would be amazing if you added this emergent gameplay since it would make late game much more unpredictable in large battles vs always dealing with the same behavior!
That said, another aspect I would really like for you to adjust is how ships deploy. Atm ships deploy with a max row of 5 which often leads to ships blowing up or clumping together taking them forever to actually reach the battle. If you could add a config value we could edit in the games config file so we could adjust the amount of rows that would be really nice!
Another feature that I think should be added is the fact AI fleets should recover ships they destroy as well with the possibility of rearming them. Atm only the player can do that and it would be nice to see certain fleets grow over time and others mothballing ships to go sell them at markets (mostly scavengers)