lorewise, large battles last for several days. i don't think it makes sense for even the largest capital ship to require hours (or anything more than a couple minutes, at most) to get orders from the commanding officer down to the individual gunners.
Lorewise, the current CP system makes zero sense.
These lorewise things are mutable and can be changed if need be.
And the campaign clock doesn't tick at all during the player's battles, so the "battles take days" doesn't hold much water with me, until the campaign clock actually keeps ticking-- though it should, since it's a good way to discourage kiting instead of the confusing peak performance timer activation conditions.
That said, I am not a navy ship expert and I was just putting it out there as a possible alternative. The first idea of just a limited amount of contemporaneous orders is a lot simpler and makes more sense maybe. Though it takes time to calculate new targeting vectors, acceleration curves, sight guns, etc. I really do think there is some underlying logic to military operations that makes receiving tonnes of rapid, contradictory orders kind of impossible organizationally.
The reason we have limited CP in the first place is to keep the player focused on the action instead of updating orders on the tactical map every couple of seconds. It's a micromanagement reduction mechanism.
I've heard this, though there is sense to it. Another one people recite sometimes is "trade isn't meant to be remunerative." I think it's good to question these things occasionally. Maybe if someone really likes to micromanage and spend their XP to get more CP at one time, we should let them?
But yes people do play RTSs in stupid ways: They pause every 2 seconds and issue fussy orders to every unit, etc. After my stand against ship hoarding in the other thread I hardly want to see this behavior. So you're right with a combo approach. Unlimited CP before battle begins to make groupings and assign ship behaviors, then CP limited to respond to developing threats.
If we just allow a limited number of orders active at one time based on how much leadership skill you have, it's still possible for people to pause every 2 seconds and change those orders. that's the benefit of some kind of 'recharge' time between which you couldn't issue new orders either globally or just for a particular ship.
I also kind of like the dominions 4 model where you assign each unit a behavior before battle begins: like "attack large enemies", "attack nearest", "defend this other unit" or whatever. Maybe something could be learned from that too. Right now SS orders are totally "target focused" meaning you can't assign a lot of behaviors until you actually see the enemy ships on the map. So we can't really plan battles ahead of time, and yet we aren't allowed to micromanage. Perhaps making orders more focused on a wide range of friendly ship behaviors would be better and allow more robust pre-battle planning, so that there'd be less desire to micromanage during battle.