You should find yourself a team of programmers and start incentivizing them somehow!

Sigh....

A couple more things:

1. There should be a little check box to indicate damage by bombers and destroyers to be inflicted is to be dispersed, or concentrated.

2.  If launching an attack from a carrier, the player should be able to select which and how many forces he wants to use for the attack.

3.  A carrier defending an attack will automatically launch figs, just like stationed figs or main fleet figs would.   It could also launch bombers in defense, if the controlling player has checked another little check box next to the carrier as it is listed in fleet pane: (launch bombers when defending an attack if enemy destroyers are detected).  This would provide carriers a bit of defense without destroyers.

Let's be clear, capital ships are not coming to Imperial Conflict any time in the foreseeable future.

And I go active.

Lets take this idea down a notch, instead of capital ships there would be "fleets" they would be permanently independent units wether they have anything assigned to them or not. If nothing is assigned to them they are inactive until they receive units.

A fleet would behave exactly like a DS, it's coordinates would be a system not a specific planet. It would belong to an empire and not the family because then it defeats the purpose of limiting portals, if there are 10 players in a family and 5 fleets per player then the family would deploy fleets in 50 different locations because everyone could use each and every fleet as a springboard for attack, on the other hand if they are limited to just the individuals using them, there might be 2 or 3 fleets from the same family deployed to the same system.

So instead of calling it a DS it becomes a fleet, instead of being family asset it becomes an individual asset and instead of destroying 15% of attackers it can hold 15% of the fleet of the owner. It moves from system to system like a ds and never merges with another fleet, you can move the units from one fleet to another but never merge the actual fleets. Fleets may or may not be able to move through portals depending on the difficulty of programming.

Setting the amount per carrier/fleet would make them either too strong or too weak.

The way I see it, adding fleets or capital ships would be for one purpose and one purpose only, it would be to force people to use strategies and not always relying on brute force. It could be either a fleet or a carrier and making it a carrier adds destroyers to the equation. Destroyers could be transports with attack and defence values added. Either have destroyers deployed only to systems instead of planets, or have them allowed to defend a system even if they are deployed to a specific planet within that system.

If you have 100 destroyers deployed to 15 planets in one system, then if one planet is attacked all destroyers move into the defensive.