Great post, but I am a bit disappointed with the Diktat being treated as if the leader was a moron.
I don't play as Diktat and don't care for them but please remember, the guy actually pulled of a genius coup and built something awesome, his country is quite powerful and his people respect him, no moron would pull that off.
His ships instead shouldn't be "dumb" or worse than normal, instead they should be impractical.
Taking examples of Germany in WW1 and WW2:
1. The Paris gun worked, for real, made people believe Germany had invented stealth bombers (lol), but it was too vulnerable and once spotted by accident it attracted a ton of bombers.
2. The "landship style" tanks weren't bad idea per se, although one of the designers was kinda insane and wanted to make a 1500 tank with 1400 ton gun... something that obviously wouldn't work properly. Still, the problem with such vehicles was the logistics issues they caused.
3. One of the super heavy tanks was atually completed, and it worked, but took so long to build it that there was no chance to mass produce it.
4. The Gustav rail-mounted guns actually saw combat and did tremendous damage to their targets (one shot could pierce 35 meters of "ground" and penetrate a fortified bunker! when shooting fortresses it could penetrate 5 meters of concrete!), biggest problem was it was too easy to capture, since it moved slowly and had no defenses against that, so when enemy infantary threatened to overtake one, the germans were forced to destroy it to prevent it from being stolen.
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The "d-mod" for Diktat ships is an example of something that I found to be badly designed, I get the idea, and I get the idea of why a naval officer would decide on that, remember, he was a naval officer, not some rando, he knows how important it is for ships to have least weight as possible, if he decided to make the ship safer for his crew with other disvantages as tradeoff, it was a concious decision even if a wrong one.
That d-mod shouldn't kill more crew, it should actually work correctly, syndrian diktat ships sporting it should have the crew to be very hard to kill, something that makes sense for a Diktator, he wants his most loyal and elite subjects alive and he clearly is believing their lives are worth more than the "material" side of things.
So the d-mod should do this:
1. make the ship inefficient in many ways (as it already does).
2. protect the crew.
3. keep protecting the crew even if ship blows up... ships captured or salvaged with that d-mod right after battle should spawn a bunch of prisoners
maybe you can add less valuable prisoners to represent more "common" crewmembers and spawn them by the boatloads in those ships, have the player to consider the morals of trying to fit 5000 prisoners on his ship eating his food or ditch them