problem is, it's not ludicrous. I've tried visual novels with more real custimization in ship combat than Stellaris. (you should try out "Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius" if you don't believe me, it's freeware). It's sad that a '+ / -' system of upgrading ships from a visual novel actually give more difference to your fleets behaviour in combat than the shipdesigner in Stellaris.
Yes, but so do a lot of games (Polaris Sector, Sword of the Stars, MoO3), so that really isn't saying much. Stellaris' combat and ship design just isn't that great to start with; it's better, granted, than the very thin veneer of complexity that the other GSG games have (which usually boils down to "just have more numbers") - which is itself still better than something like Civ or GalCiv - but to make the combat better and the decisions more than "make better numbers," you'd have to fundementally re-design how the combat works (which would require MUCH better ship AI, more and different modules on a ship and a correspnding cost in dealing with the additional mass demand on processing power with the additional decision making).
Would I like to see that? Hells yes, amd I still hope I do. But at the moment, the underlying system is still a be fundementally limited by the fact the battles are still very much "two balls shp fly towards each other slowly, firing" such that trying to make things too "balanced" you could easily end up with everything is homogenised to the point where, say, the decision between small guns and big guns is nothing more than cosmetic. Which is again, making it a non-choice, just a different sort of non-choice.
The other danger, of course, if the system becomes advanced enough that there are multiple valid strategies (which perforce still only means a sub-set of options among all possible options), that when there is no "right" answer, some people will find the decision making too daunting, too hard or tedious (I've heard some folk say they already find Stellaris' ship design system to be more effort than they want to spend). You literally can't please everyone, since some people want diamterically opposite things[1].
(I spent the better part of fifteen years writing a star ship game for tabletop for a system which is essentially like a 4X in that you build your own race/fleet, so I am all too aware of the challenges involved, and my game has the advantage of only having to deal with around 40 starships in battle at once - 90 is our record - (not hundreds) and the benefit of not having the incredibly hard job of trying to teach a compute How To Tactics (and it takes long enough to train humans in that regard)... (And, at the end of the day, the most OP thing in that game is Being Better At Tactics than the other guy, which no amount of numbers can fix!)
[1]Obsidian's advantures in resource/encounter management in Pillars of Eternity 1/2, for example, because there are basically the opposed camps of "I want to have to manage resources like I did in AD&D" and "I don't want to have to manage resources like I did in AD&D."
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