[Silent Sorrow]

It's so odd that you should bring this up just now because I was thinking the same thing only yesterday. I'm new to the game and am just getting into it (love it so far) and early on I encountered another empire in a quick start game. I had four destroyers and parked them at a warp point in the enemy system. It had taken me a fair amount of resources to travel to the system such that I didn't care to risk driving in further and attacking any ships/planets.

At first I thought, "Oh wait, I can't do that (sit there and do nothing) because I'm going to run out of supplies anyway." So I advanced a few turns and checked my supplies only to notice that I hadn't lost any. So sitting there consumes no supplies. I, too, thought this odd given the fact supply use was modeled in the first place. In game terms what this meant was I was able to kind of "blockade" the system while waiting for another fleet to be built that I could send there for an actual assault. I can see how I might be able to exploit this and gain a quasi-unfair advantage.

What I'd like to see is that even if your ships are doing nothing they use supplies but only at a very fractional rate. For example, at present, I think it's something like 25 or 50 units of supply used for each movement point. For sitting idle, you could be charged something like two points/turn. This would nicely simulate ships being out in the field on garrison duty or whatever but still using supplies and still requiring periodic resupply or rotation back to rear areas.