[Puke]

no, i have come to accept the fact that i will never win a furball.

its not a problem of trust, its a problem of accidents. people will probably want to have their build queue's full and with 0.1 years of build time remaining for large ships, just waiting for one of their five to be destroyed.

if someone misses a turn, or forgets to check one of their queues, extra ships could slip out.

in the begining, you might want to set all of your planets building ships, assuming that one of the planets might get glassed and not produce.

but i guess thats a moot point now. the only way to do it is to make all scores visible, and penalize players that have more than 5 ships.

It might be possible to just have the computer control players that build more than 5 ships, until they are back under the limit. of course, that could cause more problems if the AI keeps building ships...