War

• Semi-permanent fleets (lose cohesion when changed)
• Fleet battles (large, generally prepared for)
• Costly repairs
• Maintenance costs
• Beyond repair: ships sometimes have to be salvaged or disposed of
• Partial repair: need good facilities for a full repair
• Crew HR: HR is lost when people are lost
• Fleet cohesion: Fleet needs to go through long training, or, better, trial by fire, to be effective. Changing the fleet structure makes it lose cohesion quickly.
• Drills: Fleets can spend higher maintenance costs to exercise and build cohesion
• Unit types
• Doctrines (general warfare scheme) -> strategies (battle plan) -> tactics -> execution (done by commanders)
• Human losses
• Mercenaries: neutral fleets that are created by enterprising privates that can be hired
• Pirates: gather along the trading routes and start to make shipping more expensive. Need to be cleared out with investments.
• System defense force: cheap immobile fleets
• Land wars: long multi-stage affairs
  • Bombardment
  • Propaganda
  • Landing
  • Diversions
  • Combat
  • Resistance fighters: aiding or fighting you for a long time
• Wunderwaffe
• Unconventional warfare, shunned by most
• Recon

Fleets

Fleets are semi-permanent, meant to be tailored to the task and not intended to rapidly change or move across the universe. Fleets are specialized for combat, and moving all ships in combat formation needs time for preparation and resources. Thus, fleets will be able to do less than one jump in combat-ready state per turn, avoiding the need for players to gamble in two generals' problem. Fleets will be able to do long jumps in short time, being towed and moving one ship at a time through friendly systems, but this leads to the loss of the cohesion and fleet will need some time to recover after this. This eases the player's assessment of threats and reduced micromanagement.

Combat

Combat should be designed to be easily estimated by a human, given proper intelligence. Ships should not utilize hit point system a lot, instead they are defeated on successful hit, losing combat ability and retreating. They, however, usually can be repaired, thus a lost battle does not lead to snowballing.