CR is intended to address the following:
- Campaign-level supply use and logistics
- Preventing kiting from being the god-tactic
- Breaking stalemates - i.e. forcing battles to keep pace
It addresses the first issue just fine; you deploy, you pay some supplies. It makes sense and feels fair.
It fails to satisfy the second issue; kiting is
still the god-tactic, but it's more inconvenient now. If you can't kite everything to death where you previously were able to, you can chain-flagship to do it in the world of restrictive CR timers.
The third issue is half-addressed. Yes, it breaks stalemates, but due to chain-flagship tactics it does not force battles to keep pace. You can potentially fight for an hour, plinking away at enemy ships in a chain of 25 Medusas.
On top of that, it does have the downside of making early game battles more difficult and less fun, due to the fact that the ships you start with (frigates and sometimes destroyers) have the worst CR timers. Later in the game, when you're piloting a cruiser, the CR time limit is not as restrictive and only becomes a fun-limiter in edge cases (an acceptable trade-off). Of course, even then, you're incentivized to chain-flagship because the overall supply costs will be much lower that way.
Bottom line is that if you removed CR timers, you would have to address the following somehow:
- Endless kiting tactics (for those of you who haven't played prior to CR being a mechanic, kiting was vastly superior to every other tactic. It's like a duel with pistols, except that you snipe your opponent from afar while he's waiting for you to show up.)
- Unkillable phase ships
- Infinite stalemates -- the AI certainly won't give up on its own, so the player automatically loses ties if there's no mechanic to fix it!
- Costs for lengthy, hard-fought battles
On the topic of the ship limit, I'm not a fan of the hard 25 ship limit. Every other limit in the game is bendable; you can win a fight at 0% CR, carry more than your maximum cargo and fuel, etc. But for ships? At some point you're forced to juggle your fleet composition in storage locations like it's Diablo, and your late-game growth and fleetbuilding fun comes to a grinding halt.