AI does target a single ship if it can.
It means the whole torpedo/missile/interceptor salvo will be aimed onto a single ship, usually the closest to the AI forces.

Autoresolve plays it fair, but a human player may and probably should cheese the missiles mechanics by placing ships in front of the ...

I'm not saying "the only viable strategy".
I'm saying "the only optimal strategy".

As in if you follow it you'll win regardless of map composition, who's around and all that.
We'll need some yardstick as to measure what is successful and what isn't.

Here, I ran a sample game on brutal, 5 opponents ...

I recall talking about it back in 2015 when farms and mines were just implemented into the game.
Well, the game is out for quite some time now and, I believe, it's time to return to this.

Simply put, the combination of mechanics leaves quite a narrow spectrum of successful strategies for pretty ...

I would love to see such a thing :)
Sparse stars plus marathon pace do the trick.

<Real life comparisons skipped>
You're wrong in most of your examples.
However, it's a forum to discuss the game, not measuring grounds.

The only relevant thing for the game is that the vehicles tend to get ...

Personally not a fan of the 'small ships go obsolete' theory.
Me neither.
However, it's the only one I can think of that has potential to work without redesigning the whole game around it.

How abouth putting ships under AI control withouth the need for leaders or any similar restraint?
It can ...

There is a very simple yet hard answer for large scale fleets.
Make the small and cheap ships obsolete.

A bit like as with real life fighter planes progression, the better they get, the less you can afford to build.
What if every next ship hull had roughly twice as cost as a previous type, but ...

The influence doesn't make any sense and it's natural, because diplomatic interactions do not hold much sense either.
As long as any race you have any treaty but an alliance with can declare they suddenly need your worlds now, it's kinda doomed and can serve only as a forced peace option (like with ...

so you can increase their survivability and overall effectiveness without necessarily making them one-shot-one-kill monsters.

That's not the problem.
The problem is that in the current paradigm either fighters are worse than missiles, either they are better than missiles, because they aren't ...

As the game does not have any AOE weapons, the sparse formation of a fleet at the battle start doesn't make any sense.
Almost each battle starts with missile salvos, so keeping the ships as close to each other as it gets ensures maximum PD effectiveness.
Also, there's no need to form ships into ...

It's a usual conundrum for space games.
Either fighters are useless, either they are imbalanced.
That's because they share the role with missiles (a fighter is a hopefully reusable missile) and they can be killed exactly the same way as a missile.
For fighters and missiles to be balanced, fighter ...

I like adding DGS as a weapons mod.

However, that will make fighters even more useless and won't help much in the late game against ridiculously powerful defense primaries.

These purple hands, how do they work?
Are they a limiter of a total size of the deal (like in SD2), are they a replenishable to the cap resource (like in SR2) or are they just a usual non-capped resource (like in EL)?
Do slaves reproduce while you own them and if they do, do you retain the surplus ...

Well, regarding UIs...

The ship design UI should be slightly modified.
When you select a hardpoint on a ship, only the applicable modules should be left in the list on the right side.

The automatic configuration generator does a very good job when you discover a ship type.
All other updates you ...

Okay, let's start with a typical late game situation - http://i.imgur.com/AW1ntdw.png
Late game as in "you start steamrolling".

There are several factors that lead to it.

First, the food production model is quite complex.
On a first glance we've got several tiers of planets: paradise and coral ...

If you're in for painting a whole galaxy, you'll run out of food in your conquest.
It's too much of a hassle to repurpose conquered wolds into farms.
I don't know what exact victory conditions there will be, though.

It's too late for any core changes in the game.
If there was more time, I'd ...