Make Federation Fleets Work Similarly to the Galactic Defense Force

[mial42]

Currently, federation fleets take a fixed % of a federation's naval capacity and turn it into a combined federation force, up to a flat cap. But this cap is extremely low; 200 ships per 10% of naval capacity, which is trivial for a federation to reach by midgame. This makes the Entente Coordination diplomacy tradition (and, I believe some of the Martial Alliance perks, although I never use that fed type) useless, and by endgame can lead to literally thousands of lost naval cap. The upkeep-free (well, not counting fed taxes) nature of the fleet is nice, but 600 upkeep-free ships for thousands of navy cap is not worth it. The Galactic Defense Force does this much better; an alloy tax for otherwise upkeep-free ships. Entente Coordination and comparable Martial Alliance perks can either reduce the tax or increase the total size of the federation fleet.

 

[Incompetent]

Unless you're running a Hegemony (where it's basically a mechanic to steal naval cap off non-president members to keep them weaker), federation fleets are effectively a broken mechanic once you have 2000+ naval cap (certainly if you have that much individually as president, and arguably once the federation collectively has that much cap). There's no point trading in masses of naval cap for a few upkeep-free ships, when the whole point of naval cap is to keep upkeep down.

Not taxing members' naval cap would certainly make the mechanic less broken, but I think the cap itself needs to be rethought as well, if federation fleets are supposed to be a relevant mechanic in the mid-game. The Martial Alliance in particular is apparently designed to a large extent around having the best federation fleet, which becomes nonsense later in the game if the fleet can only ever have 75 battleships (or the equivalent in smaller ships).