As it stands right now, even just a single exploration ship can blockade a system, with all the penalties to the system and movement of non-friendly ships that entails, just as effectively as a dozen powerful fleets.


I think the effectiveness of a blockade should be determined by some overall score based on attack power and/or ship count, and countered by development/populations levels of the system and overall traffic going through the system.

So that single exploration ship should only able to somewhat penalize the output of a 30+ population level 4 system, since it is still just a single ship and can't possibly cripple/halt all civilian movement on its own, even taking into account a fear of travel that the civilians would have due to the threat/harrassment.

By the same logic, that single exploration ship should only be able to halt the first X amount of ships/fleets passing through. Additional traffic should be able to simply pass through that turn.


On the flip side though, multiple 30+ command point fleets with the best possible armaments should be able to bring the output of even a large system down considerably, absolutely crippling poorly developed single-planet systems, and be able to handle stopping the movement of a much larger count of fleets/ships.