Ive played the game vs 4 comp 3 times and won twice once in hard mode. ive noticed that the tactic of decking your "cheap" ship (mainly destroyer) will destroy even heavier ships on the first phase even if they have a better qualification in terms of power, making other phase irrelevant. i think the reasons for the unbalance comes from:



1 having many little ship make them open fire all at once so while a bigger ship migh seem stronger it gets outgunned before it can dish out enough firepower to destroy the whole fleet in time to survive.



2 bigger ship have more tonage than smaller ships but their hp is relatively low, if you wish to increase their hp you have to go thru a lane making the player sacrifice research and gaining nothing in return because the ship will still have very poor armor and wepons go thru their hp in no time. ( i think heavier ships should have HP relative to how much fleet space they fill and then some for the reaserch time spent for them.)



3 defensive upgrades should block more (1.5 maybe) of their counterpart (same lvl of research) weapon. so far i see weapons too powerful for any effective defence. of course this brings whole new problems regarding admirals and their bonuses admirals and ( in my opinion admirals should only bring new orders and improvement on orders given to the fleet, not an actual increase in ofensive/defensive values)



so far the game shows promise but with fireboat tactics making the whole battle phase system irrelevant i i have found that the game lost its fun and that battles are less about strategy and more about fleet setup and heavier tonage ships to much of a hassle for the advantage (if any) they bring.



this is the research order i follow to early domination with sophon (the weak ones), early planet research, destroyer, destroyer resources, lasers and deflection (until it start taking more than 7 turns for the research) then fleet command capacity. the game goes downhill from there.



Thank You for reading and good hunting

/#/endless-space/forum/33-strategy-guides/thread/14004-attrition-combat-the-defenseless-destroyer-rush-why-and-how-to-address-it You may be interested in reading this thread as well. It's on the same topic, as best as I understand.