A ship with laser is cool but 10000 ships pitted against each other (with lasers) is epic, and EPIC is what we want.
I just want to point out that 10,000 ships is not "epic," it's pointless. There's no practical way to show a battle between 10,000 ships on the battlefield at a level where the detail is much more than a bunch of little specks and flashing lights. There's a reason why movies, even those depicting major battles, typically focus in on small groups of people rather than showing the bird's eye view of the battlefield with a bunch of little specks floating around and occasionally producing little specks of light; even those movies, documentaries, or television programs that do depict large scale battles from the bird's eye view do so after reducing the number of things being shown to color-coded blobs labelled with markings like "1st Division, US 1st Army" or "3rd Battalion, 9th Panzers," of which you might typically see 5 to 30 at any given time. 10,000 ships fighting one another is a potentially interesting backdrop and can be an interesting tactical and logistical question, but it's not a particularly interesting engagement from the point of view of watching the fighting at large.
I would further point out that you do not have grounds to claim that you know what "we" want - you know what you want, but without the input of any other person, you do not know what a group wants. There are more than likely other people on the forum who want "EPIC" battles, where "EPIC" is defined as "having a significant number of ships in the engagement," but this is probably not the entire forum. Nor will everyone agree that this is a suitable definition of "EPIC," nor will you likely get an agreement on the minimum number of ships required to qualify for this definition of "EPIC."
I will also add that real-world naval battles, which are the real-world battles which have the most similar level of investment in the individual fighting units engaged, very rarely have more than a couple hundred ships engaged, and smaller engagements which involve only ten or twenty smaller ships at most are much more common than the large fleet battles involving hundreds of ships.
I mean we are using the resources of a galaxy, in a struggle for supremacy, against all other sentient beings to determine which if any of us deserve to live, and in this struggle we only have fleets of 4 ships? and the most powerful empire, only has 150 ships?
In Galactic Civilizations, we are very clearly not using anything approaching the resources of an entire galaxy. Indications are that the entire map of Galactic Civilizations is no more than a ball perhaps a couple hundred light-years in diameter (the actual absolute dimension of the Immense GCII map are unclear; Toria and Drengi are known to be separated by 20 light-years, I'd estimate Arcea and Drengi to be separated by about 15 light-years, and I'd estimate Earth and Altaria to each be about 23 light-years from Arcea, based on the information in the Databanks, though relative locations are elusive and only the absolute distance between Drengi and Toria is a known quantity; still, that's at least four of the known major species who have homeworlds contained within a sphere of diameter no greater than about 60 light-years). Further, FTL warships are a relatively new and extremely expensive thing for the known major species in the Galactic Civilizations universe, and in-game even the tiny hulls are shown to cost sizable fraction of the gross domestic product of a world of 8 billion people to maintain (of course, this varies a bit depending on what you've built on the planet). This is not the kind of setting in which you can expect to have enormous fleets of warships available for whatever purpose you need them for. Another argument is that we know that there are at least eight major species which are to be included in GCIII, and there were up to twelve in GCII; since none of these are known to possess the ability to travel to other galaxies, none of these could have the resources of an entire galaxy at their disposal since none of them actually controls the entire galaxy (well, in the GCII campaigns, the Drengin and Yor at some point could be said to control the majority of the part of the galaxy in which the major factions reside, with the Drengin holding a slightly larger piece of the pie, but even then it's doubtful that that represents anything approaching the entire Milky Way).
A further argument against Galactic Civilizations involving access to the resources of an entire galaxy is that even if the parsecs of Galactic Civilizations were taken to represent real-world parsecs (3.26 light-years), it would take a GCII:TotA huge hull with the best Terran hyperdrives roughly 11.8 years to cross the Milky Way, as Huge hulls with Stellar Folding hyperdrives cap out around 50 parsecs per week (huge hulls have the greatest potential number of move actions per turn of any GCII hull size). We also know that Galactic Civilizations parsecs do not actually represent real-world parsecs; my best guess for how they actually relate would be that the real-world parsec is the distance that a hyperdrive-equipped vessel with a 1 parsec per week movement rating would travel in one week when the hyperdrive is negligibly affected by gravity (i.e. far from any nearby massive bodies like stars and planets), though Gaunathor may turn up with a quote linking to Draginol's not particularly useful description of what the Galactic Civilizations adjusted parsec represents to argue that this isn't what was meant. Regardless, indications are that the Galactic Civilizations parsec averages out to something considerably smaller than a real-world parsec, and so that 11.8 year trip to cross the Milky Way is likely considerably longer. Good luck making practical use of the resources of an entire galaxy with those kinds of travel times, even if you don't need to be limited to controlling only a piece of the galaxy because you have seven or more competitors of sufficient size to be ranked as the major powers of the Galactic Civilizations universe.
I will also point out that the Drengin armadas over Arcea and Earth, depicted in the opening cutscene, may well represent abnormally large concentrations of the Drengin fleet. The only other known power which could potentially seriously threaten the Drengin as rulers of the known part of the galaxy, at least as things stand in Galactic Civilizations lore, are the Yor, and the Yor are currently allies of the Drengin. Earth and Altaria are all that is left of the human and altarian empires, with their former colonies conquered or eradicated; both the Arcean Empire and the Torian Confederation have been completely conquered, and the Drath Legion has been virtually exterminated. There were only eleven major powers in Galactic Civlizations II (the Korath don't really count as they were a rebellious faction within the Drengin Empire, and thus presumably much or all of their territory is currently in Drengin hands and had been prior to their rebellion), and the Drengin and Yor now together control the majority of the territory of seven of those powers (including themselves). The only other faction which could likely have comparable resources at present is the Krynn Syndicate, as they're the merger of the Krynn Consortium and the Korx Dominion, two of the lesser major powers of Galactic Civilizations II; the Iridium Corporation might possibly have comparable resources, but the Iridium Corporation is at present a largely unknown quantity, and since they're a power which was late to the party, so to speak, I rather suspect that they're a relatively minor power at present.
If all twelve of the known powers originally had approximately equal resource bases, the Drengin are now equivalent to at least 3.5 major powers (probably more, since although they split the spoils with the Yor, the Drengin took the larger share), the Yor are similar to but somewhat smaller than the Drengin, the Krynn are equivalent to no more than 2 major powers, and the Iconians, Thalan, and Iridium are at about 1 each. Of course, we also know that the Drengin and the Arceans were the greatest of the known powers, and the Drengin now control at least the Arcean homeworld and probably much of the former Arcean Empire, so it's probable in my opinion that the scales are even more skewed in favor of the Drengin (and, to a lesser extent, the Yor), the Thalans and Iconians are likely relatively small powers, and the Korx were a lesser power before they merged with the Krynn; the Iconians are also known to have been part of the coalition which fought the Dread Lords, which would suggest that they may have lost some portion of their resource base during the wars, and as allies of the Humans and enemies of the Yor, they may have taken part in the wars against the Drengin-Yor Alliance, which could have resulted in some of their resources ending up in Drengin or Yor hands afterwards. In short, the Drengin and the Yor are likely the biggest bullies on the playground by a significant margin, except perhaps in comparison to one another. They have the resources available to stick ~30% of their fleets over the conquered or besieged homeworlds of their enemies and still have the strength to face any of the other current powers, and possibly any combination of the other current powers, and as such I don't consider the opening cutscene to be a reasonable guide to the number of warships that any of the major powers could, or even would, have normally fielded in a single fleet, and I also consider it likely that there are a relatively large number of transports, rather than true warships, present in both fleets shown in the cutscene.
