Well, I have considered developing somewhat from the shuttle attack sequence.
Multiply hull and shield by ten, and take from them a random integer between 1 and current combat of the firing ship.
Numbers may need tweaking though, since I'm worried that combat would get bogged down - I think a prototypical battle between two escorts with C3 H2 L2 should still finish in about 6 turns. Or maybe turns don't matter much here, since combat is practically continuous? But still, anything that depends on turn count, like escape time, will have to be balanced against overall combat rate.
Thinking about this some more, in order to have ships have approximately the same "rate of fire" regardless of fleet size during a battle, turns must approximately be inversely proportional to time. Which means that the larger the battle, the faster/shorter any "# turns"-based mechanic operates, so e.g. the larger the fleet size, the faster and more likely a ship can escape the battle if it attempts to.
This isn't a new phenomenon, but I think it bears revisiting.
Partly because if shield regeneration is based off "# turns", it's going to be really broken in large battles. And partly because if combat is revised to be "slower" with combat-based damage and X10 hull/shield factors, "# turns" will have to be rebalanced anyway.
Fleet hit % may also need to be tweaked to depend less on combat, since now combat is even more critical when it's already the most important stat in fleet battles. Perhaps have fleet hit % depend on both combat and defense, but still mostly the former?
Did some more prelim analysis on this. The way the combat stat can affect both damage and fleet hit % can result in counter-intuitive results.
Here's a simplified combat model, where combat = damage (no RNG), round-robin ship selection and targeting, and all ships have equivalent all-shield durability (to make hull/shields non-factors, or at least that ships in a fleet will die about simultaneously).
C6 (Excelsior) vs enemy C8
avg damage per turn: 6^1.15/(6^1.15+8^1.15)*6 ~= 2.51
C6 (Excelsior) + C3 (Centaur-A or Miranda-A) vs enemy C8
avg damage per turn: 9^1.15/(9^1.15+8^1.15)*(6+3)/2 = 2.40
If ship durability were taken into account, then the avg damage over time is lower, but that's compensated by the ships surviving longer to deal more overall damage. So if I were to try computing total damage over the time it would take for the enemy to destroy both ships, with the simplification that the enemy doesn't die (modeling damage over time for both fleets isn't easy and approaches differential equation territory...?), I get:
C6 L9 (Excelsior) vs enemy C8 L∞
avg turns before death: 90/(8^1.15/(6^1.15+8^1.15)*8) = 19.331
avg total damage before death: 6^1.15/(6^1.15+8^1.15)*6*90/(8^1.15/(6^1.15+8^1.15)*8) = 48.487
avg damage per turn: 48.487/19.331 = 2.508
C6 L9 (Excelsior) + C3 L5 (Centaur-A or Miranda-A) vs enemy C8 L∞
avg turns before death: (50+50)/(8^1.15/(9^1.15+8^1.15)*8) + (90-50)/(8^1.15/(6^1.15+8^1.15)*8) = 35.405
avg total damage before death: 9^1.15/(9^1.15+8^1.15)*((6*50+3*50)/2/(8^1.15/(9^1.15+8^1.15)*8) + 6*(90-50)/(8^1.15/(6^1.15+8^1.15)*8)) = 59.722
avg damage per turn: 59.722/35.405 = 1.687
So despite the lower avg damage per turn, the Excelsior+Miranda-A/Centaur-A should still win. Still looks odd though. Peculiarly how more damage starts being dealt when the Centaur-A/Miranda-A dies, leaving the half-shields Excelsior by itself.
Might have made a mistake somewhere. I think I'd have to write a combat simulator to verify, but that's more effort than I'm willing to spend at the moment. And obviously, this is only a single set of examples.
Altogether, I'm beginning to think that a RPG-esque rounds + initiative system (think D&D) would work better than this turns + fleet hit % system.
Another option that addresses your concerns (by creating a useful reason for combat-focused explorer-sized ships to exist) would be if larger ships get bonuses to shield regeneration once we get higher in the tech tree, due to greater total power generation capability.
Yeah, this got me thinking about how shield regeneration is going to work, leading to above thoughts.
That is an option, but I think we should, from time to time, have studies on the construction of military escorts, just in case we need to rush such a design into prototype and production. mind you, we won't be able to do this often, but having the groundwork done in case of dire need could save us a lot of hardship
Well, while it's a good idea to have military designs ready for emergencies, I don't see how this could really work with the way the whole ship design process works. In order to get a new design into production, we have to spend pp for even get approval to start the design project. Then we have to build a prototype - and currently this is longest part of the new ship design process. Also, if the design would have a militarisation cost (C-D>2 is one way to get militarisation cost), it's unclear how that will work out - the cost might get applied when we trying to get approval from the Council, or it could be applied per ship build, including the prototype.
There just isn't a clear-cut way for us to design militarized ships to be ready for mass production in an emergency without actually spending pp to research the ship design project and build a prototype.
We can freely come up with design proposals, as is done in the SDB, but that's not the same as having such designs ready in a jiffy for a war.
