My next door neighbour with one planet has ~40 capital ships in fleets at the moment, not counting defence forces with more capital ships.
I can only have 5 with one planet +3 from my veterans. :(


Let's see if I can faster destroy them than he can rebuild :)

Truth to be told, there are plenty of roaming caps in Concord territory as well, but those don't belong to fleets. You can see quite a few caps pop up when one of your installations gets assaulted, as well.

As far as roaming warfleets go (the little ships cruising around the map), those seem to have a much more manageable count.

I meant fleets, the little ships the AI uses to recapture outposts.
Nearly every fleet 2 carriers and 3 dreadnoughts, 4 or 5 fleets in total.

ps. not counting battleships :)

Mh, Maginot definitely isn't a good start. The Ward and the Union are the classic "soft targets" to go for first, since they don't field anything larger than frigates.

There's also the "Master Switch". One of the planets (I forget which) offers you to reset all your standings for a small fee, turning the entire map blue.

Diplomacy only unlocks dialogue options during the campaign, IIRC. Negotiation is yet another boarding perk. I think it improves the trooper-to-capture chance ratio, but I might be mistaken here.

With Diplomacy III you can demand more reparations when negotiating peace.
With Merchant you can sell Loot to members of your fleet, so you don't need to fly back to a station.
I really like how all those 'soft'-skills matter in the normal gameplay outside the campaign.

But going back to 30-40 capital ships in enemy factions. I still believe it is balanced.

With my Dreadnought, one Carrier and Tara, I can take out an enemy fleet with 3-4 enemy capital ships. The AI will not be able to rebuild them that fast, once they are destroyed.
Only problem are fleets with level 50 veterans and a couple of capital ships. But you can go in, destroy one or two, retreat, go back in until he is the only ship left in the fleet.

I play Vanguard and that class is rather tanky, no idea how you would handle those with a softer class.

p.s. and if you die it is not that big a deal, there are plenty of autosaves and it saves every time you dock somewhere.