Am I missing (or did I miss) something, or does this thread bring up two issues?
1) Is it possible to "cheat" and change your own settings.txt to allow base fleeting, and thereby be able to fleet bases in PBW games where it is supposed to be disallowed?
2) Is there some sort of limit on the number of fleets in a game, after which the game hangs up during processing? If so, do we know what that limit is?
I can confirm that there appears to be a limit to the number of fleets one can have. I had a reproducible error that I encountered many times in the Ankle-Biters game when I reached the point where my fleet names had run out of default greek letters and I just got a blank name. I can go back and look for the post (it was quite a while ago) but like I mentioned above I can say it was reproducible and always seemed to happen when I fleeted units. At the time I hit "create fleet" the game would hang and would have to be ctrl-alt-del killed and restarted.
I got around this by naming fleets on my own rather than just letting the game assign names.