[Emperor's Child]

I think my main issue is not stacking, which I can understand from a game balance perspective, but not allowing ships to pass over others. It just does not make sense at all that you can build an impassable wall of ships abreast in space, the AI handles this poorly, people do the HUH? It would be less artificial if they were allowed to move OVER other ships, but not land on them.

Now, on the topic of stacking... This would be a much more complex code alteration and would significantly alter game play. However, if stacking were allowed, ships would be able to mass fire much more efficiently than they can today (which presumes that opposing forces choose not to stack themselves). But how does that kill the game's flavor? Formations in space are formed for...why? Because you can't stack? A better (more realistic) answer would be that ships in close formation are easy targets... like shooting fish in a barrel.

I would propose that if your were to allow stacking, you should also stipulate the following rules for ships in a stack:

1. Every ship above the first in a stack gives a -5% defensive modifier to ALL ships in the stack to reflect the “fish in a barrel” quality of maneuvering together. So, if you have 20 ships in a stack you would have a –100% defensive modifier, etc…

2. 25% of damage from hits to one ship in the stack will “spill over” to EVERY other ship in the stack, representing the other ships getting caught in the crossfire, getting hit by pieces of the first ship, etc.

This would give some rather compelling effects to the rest of the ships in a stack and would give lots of good reason why they normally don’t want to do it.