Currently multiple battles in-system are impossible. This means fleets of individual ships can trivially bloat a system and make killing the enemy tedious or impossible.



I personally believe that this could be solved by making additional combats take up one or more movements (to indicate you getting to the additional ships) based on where a balance is found.



What do other people think?

I made a thread a while ago dealing with this topic, in a different way though, it includes what I'm thinking about the problem: /#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/11968-suggestion-fleets-assault-points

What if:

• Unlimited combats per turn up to the number of movement points.
• Each combat takes 1 movement point, and runs faster than it does now. Only one card per combat instead of one per phase.
• If there are opposing fleets left when a combat ends, and the attacker has at least one movement point left, a new combat begins immediately (with a new card for each side). The attacker can choose to retreat instead.
• Ship HPs increased to compensate for the higher number of combats.
  
  

As for the unlimited combat, that could work but that wouldn't be easy to balance.



One card ber battle wouldn't work, that would severely decrease the combat depth and so far it already isn't as high as most other 4X games. That's not an completely bad point but reducing the depth further would severely injure the game for me, I personally hate watching my fleets do stupid stuff when I know they could do better. Can't demand a battle system like in Space Empires 5 which I personally really enjoyed but we definitely shouldn't reduce the depth further.



Automatically continuing combats doesn't sound great either, though it would fix the problem of the end of the battle being unrealistic, still not sure about it.

As far as balance goes, I'm not sure it would be harder to balance than the current system, which is obviously unbalanced.



If more combats are played (due to higher ship HPs), then more cards will be played too, so it might balance out. I'm just worried about things going by too fast to pick a card if it's speeded up, or things taking too long if it isn't. I wouldn't mind longer combats; right now most battles only last a single phase.



The reason I suggested automatic continuing combats is so you don't have to reload the combat screen each time. In terms of outcome, it makes no difference whether you automatically continue with the option to retreat instead, or if it stops with the option to fight again.

I agree with somehow automatically continuing combat, say if there are still enemy ships in the certain area... I haven't been playing that long and have already seen some tediousness around eliminating multiple fleets. I like the idea of perhaps longer or phased combat situations, but not sure how that would effect balance.