SE4 has seen 3000+ baseship battles...
The only problem is that the ships start to overlap the stellar objects and even each other on the combat screen
I once dumped a thousand ships into one system in Starfury...
Got 0.25 frames per second with a junk video card set to max sight distance, and a sky filled with 2-pixel ships shooting half-pixel sparkles at each other as far as the eye could see in all directions