IMO that kind of thing is a design problem more so then a gameplay problem. It's common in this gerne to give the AI massive bonuses as a way to increase difficulty, the AI often already plays at maximum "smartness" at low difficulty settings. Additionally in galciv 2 specifially the AI also has to compensate for limited ship designs available to it. This results in the AI having massive fleets. 

64bit AI and ship/strategy data mining should go quite a way to solve this. Especially if some of the things frogboy has been claiming regarding practically unbeatable non cheating AI are true.  Should the problem still arise, i think the solution should be in improving the AIs surrender mechanics, rather then any direct combat/gameplay bonus.

But really no matter how you look at this, it really comes down to deciding when the AI is beaten, which strikes me as a very hard problem both objectively and subjectively. Which is why id prefer this problem be prevented in the first place. 

Well, I don't know about you, but if I'm doing my job correctly, all my opponents will be significantly weaker than me by 2/3rds of the way through the game.

Hello (first post on forum, i'm intimidated ^^')

A basic solution to reduce the issue would be to automatically merge the isolated enemy ships into a fleet as large as enemy current logistics permits (i think endless space did that). It makes sense since if i was a pilot, surrounded by allies, seeing a big fleet coming in my way, i'll call my allies to join the fight instead of going alone to be slaughtered alone!

This merge shouldn't include non combat ships as it also make sense that you join a fight only if you have weapons to fight! (should it work if there's only non combat ships? not sure... make sense for non combat ships to disperse if attacked)

However, this solution only reduce the problem since:

- it would only work on one hexagon (which means still have to make your way through a bunch of dispersed small vessels)

- it's limited to the logistics capabilities of the enemy, which can be quite low

A more advanced solution should be to include all hexes surrounding the attacked hex into the fleet merging => clean 7 hex in one go.

An even more advanced solution should be to get rid of the hard cap on logistics capability and replace it by negative things like friendly fire, defense reduction and so on (the more beyond the current cap you are, the more maluses).

with 100 races and huge maps AND still have memory to spare, I think it won't be a problem....oh not 100 logistics but ships lol now I get it.

Even so, tiny ships are 1 logistics point so maybe I'm still right.

DARCA.