I've been playing mainly campaign mode for the narrative, but the battles feel small, rather than epic clashes between armadas.

I would like to suggest twofold:
That a slider be added to the start campaign settings, allowing for a player to increase or decrease leadership and fleet cap of both their own and AI factions by a percent, allowing for epic battle campaigns of 1000's of points on the field at once, or small skirmish campaigns. This slider for example could range from 50% to 250% (or more) giving a leadership cap at renown 16 between 825 and 4125. I feel this would allow for more epic scale play and give advantages (or disadvantages) as fleets would start off small but with much more buildup potential, meaning unchecked AI systems could build up serious force.

Secondly, the fleet organisation (at least in campaign). I think firstly a mechanic to enable re-ordering of ships in a fleet should be implemented, and that the order ships are deployed/reinforced in battle should be player selected rather than automatically generated. I also suggest an option for "realistic fleet organisation" checkbox in start of campaign settings, which removes all points limits on fleet size but instead restricts ships by tonnage, limiting the amount of a certain ship type that can be in a given fleet, to prevent "spamming" the same ship. This could also scale with my previous suggestion of the %size slider.

I think this has the potential to improve campaign experiences for both those who seek grand campaigns with humongous battles and a veritable armageddon of ordnance between realistic fleets, but also to cater to those who are more interested in the rich storytelling and less so in the battles.

Thoughts?

I agree 100%.

Gotta say, the small scale feel of the current game is killing me.

I remember when they first announced we'd be getting almost double the fleet points, I was expecting to have almost double the fleet... Not almost double the costs on ships.

Damn boy, I think they'll need some cream for that burn...

Seriously, would a slider be so difficult?

That's my point though, what I'm suggesting should be minimal to implement in code, but have a profound effect.

I think it works good in the campaign with the slow increase of the fleet cap but yes it could go further.

Also it should be allowed to adjust the fleet cap in single player and multiplayer 1on1 games, maybe even the 2on2 ones. Maybe not for ladder purposes but for everyone else at least.