Very nice suggestions i think, although pretty much limited to tweaks rather than large concept changes which i think we need more (but by request not going in to that
).
The only thing i do not believe that will solve a problem is making the shipstats even easier. Having less ships the same way we have now will still result in the same game. Currently initiative is everything, damage and armour are pretty much insignicant in terms of combat outcome, the side firing first generally wins unless defence is obtained. It basicly means you look for the bad initiative ship of your target race and just attack it This lead to everyone getting used to picking up free roids (or recall due to def which cannot be targetted), apart from XP players who don't mind sacrificing large amounts of value for the XP they will get from the roids (admittedly that would change using Heartless' suggested scoring changes).
I know alot of ppl probably won't agree with me, but the whole combat system just isn't realistic (i know, poor argument as its a fantasy sci-fi game, but read on). If we would take in common sense, any ship would fire in combat, regardless of them being good at taking out the target ship or not (we wouldn't let ourselves be slaughtered without giving a fight now would we). This was done in the past using weaponspeed, agility, damage and armour to determine how effective a ship would be against a target ship. It allowed ships to target any ship in the game without (theoratically) becoming to powerfull overall and thus leading to the game being more open to the use of smart / different fleet setups opposed to what we see now (whether ppl chose to do so is not really the issue, fact is the options for it were available in the combat engine).
With a combat system like that i believe combat will be alot less static (every race using the same fleet and target the same race), given initiative is worked out and ships are able to target more than just one class. The whole concept of not losing ships in combat or not being able to target ships is just a bad one i think. In 3D games any ship can target any ship, they just might be piss poor at taking them out and that is something we should be looking for aswell imo, drop the whole free roids concept!
[edit]More complex is actually a good thing if you ask me! Just allow for a clear 'mediocre' path to chose for those who can't understand the benefit of specialization. I do agree that having less ships overall will probably be a good thing.[/edit]