Below I ignored personnel, fuel, missions for now. It's only about components (mechanical stuff you install on ships).

Production & budget

I think there should be two completely separate production facilities: shipyards (produce ships) and factories (produce equipment you install on ships). It would give more control to the player (on the ratio of ships to equipment) plus it's intuitive and realistic (orbital shipyards make hulls and ground factories equipment to install on these hulls).

Also, when idle these should produce civilian goods (actually, I feel the player should be encouraged to keep like 25% of these permanently idle for purpose of supplying civilian sector and switch to 100% only during wartime). Anyway, they player would not be punished for not having a perfect ratio of shipyards to factories.

As for budget, I think there should be a numeric [$1,000,000] general military budget (production of new stuff) and then a percenatge [40%/60%] budget for shipyards & factories. So, when there is lack of resources the player can tamper with just the general military spending slider while the ratios of production would remian constant.

Also, since factories & shipyards can produce civilian goods, whenever you have too low budget to use these at full capacity these would automaticly produce resources (civilian goods/income) which later allows you to increase the military spending (a nice self balancing system without micromanagement).

by selecting core component, offensive, defensive, and luxury/misc. supply priorities. The automation takes over and the player uses whatever he gets.

Also, I was thinking of not having priorities for all things (if the choice is obvious).

For example, reactors (delivers energy). These could be fully automated, like if a ship has lots of weapons the AI installs a better reactor, when it has too much power it uninstalls current reactor and installs a weaker one instead (the AI would try to always install the weakest reactor that meets the energy criteria).

Or (more complex, not sure if it's good) boosters. The player would have a slider "optimum speed" for each fleet. The AI will try to add to that fleet ships that meet this criteria and if the ship is too slow it would add engine boosters as the first priority (overriding other priorities like weaponry and armour).

With this system I guess there would need to be some feedback system. So the AI can report to the player "we are having not enough reactors of power 40 or higher" or "more engine boosters would be nice". Then the player could adjust production priorities or budget or build more factories or order researching better reactors.

You have the mutually exclusive design component, this would be a slots based ship layout system, and it works fine.

The feedback system mentioned could occur, but I think it'd be easier to represent in strings of numbers.

Also, numbers can't tell you everything. If I tie the AI logs to "reports" then I can show the player where exactly the production AI has a problem (AIs are rarely perfect, by the numbers it might look all right sometimes and it might be a situation easy to handle by the human, but for AI it might be sometimes an obstacle it can't deal with), so, this "report" is also a sort of "AIs cry for human help" :)

You said something about a general military budget, but that seems to be the only budget we have to look at anyway.

Something about mentioning the player decides anything other than the ships, it just seems off-topic. So if you want to have the player to do those things, it is fine.

But I think it could just as easily be: player picks fleet, everything bends to make it work and it could even have a time prediction when it's done, [insert game, obstacles / something tempting the player to continue, maybe even a sandbox].

My only/primary goal is that there are no trivial decisions to make, boring stuff to deal with and chores to do (like manual replacement of old ships, moving ship one by one, etc). The rest is negotiatable :D

My only/primary goal is that there are no trivial decisions to make, boring stuff to deal with and chores to do (like manual replacement of old ships, moving ship one by one, etc). The rest is negotiable

In 2002 I made a game with similar premise and it was fun. The fun factor was that in that game, the player could manually pilot any unit and fight with the squadron and the fleet. The player could freely change their role to match the actions in the game.

1. The player can choose what and where to build (How much resource to spend on infrastructure, defense, and offense)

2. The player can choose the composition and formation of each fleet and squadron

3. The player can choose the command structure and engagement pattern of the fleet and squadron

4. The player can override and specify which target for a fleet/squadron to attack first

5. The player can override and pilot any individual unit and fight manually like an arcade game

One of the design decisions I made was to expose the decision points as physical objects in the game. Instead of interacting with a GUI to select what to do, the player makes decision by physically building stuff on the map. The implementation allows a player to tactically select what part of the enemy to disturb by destroying specific targets in the game.

In the end, I found that I just wanted to fight with a fleet in 5 minute sessions. I liked piloting a battle ship to destroy a base while being protected by small fighters. I liked piloting a small fighter with a squadron to attack battleships, or to protect supply ships from enemy small fighters. So I ended up setting up scenarios and just fight.

If the player were having any hand in designing the ship, they'd see this. If the AI was designing the ship based on what it's told then it would only have to understand this and have an optimized input method, reading the ship class and then adding the proper components in.

Let's take a look at it from the interface point of view.

Misc screens

The player would have a standard reseach screen where ship hulls and other stuff is invented (I'm ignoring it since it's easy). Then there is some sort of "imperial budget" screen where the player can decide how many credits/resources are spent on military (I will ignore that one for now too).

Ships production screen

I could have a list of all ships invented. Next to each there are buttons:

- First one is a green "build" and when you click it it turns into red "don't build" (it affects if the AI is allowed to buy that hull/ship)

- Second is green "active duty" and when you click it it turns into red "in reserve" (it affects if the AI is allowed to put that ship into fleets, if marked as "in reserve" it will try to remove this model from existing fleets, even if there are shortages)

- Third is green "in service" and when you click it it turns into red "allow scrapping" (it affects if the AI is allowed to scrap that ship model if it thinks these are outdated, too many and generally not needed anymore)

And that's it, no production priorities (generally, the AI will try to automaticly adjust production based on desired fleets composition & size, always producing the newest researched model (that is marked as allowed to be built) of desired class).

Equipment production screen

I'm not sure, maybe a list of all equipment (boosters, missiles, shields) with a priority setting? (but reactors would be not listed since these need to be selexcted by the AI (energy generated to energy used by the ship, which is much better to be left to the AI... but on the other hand, if the player knows he will soon need better reactors since a new power hungly battleships will be researched soon, he might want to say he wants more "too powerfull" reactors to be produced...) That one is hard for me :)

Fleet screen (separate per fleet)

The most important screen, it decides on the composition of your fleets. I think I would not list there any specific ships/hulls, but just classes (flagships, battleships, fighter carriers, torped corvetes, destroyers, recon frigates, etc). And the AI will decide what model of each class to assign there based on the fleet priority. Also, I think I would list the classes without exact percentages but as a description.

It could look like this:

- number of flotillas (1-6) (or "add flotilla" button)

- priority (very low, low, below average, average, above average, high, very high) [determines quality of ships and reinforcements speed]

- composition

* [support] flagships (none, minimum, optimum, maximum) [it will adjust the exact number of flagships to the size of each flotilla, default is "optimum"]

* [support] recon - similar to flagships, proportional to other ships (none, minimum, optimum, maximum)

* [combat] battleships (none, few, some, many, a lot) [how many of these proportional to other combat ships]

* [combat] cruisers (none, few, some, many, a lot) [how many of these proportional to other combat ships]

* [combat] destroyers (none, few, some, many, a lot) [how many of these proportional to other combat ships]

* [combat] etc, all types of combat ships would be listed similarly

- tactics [some setting deciding how flotillas of that fleet fight, not sure]

- agressiveness (victory at all cost, reasonable, defensive) [affects under what level of casualities flottilas of that fleet will retreat]

Probably there also need to be some sort of "equipment" setting (what install first on ships of that fleet). Without exact models of equipment, just categories (engine boosters, armours, additional shields, escape pods, targetting computers).

Flotilla screen (separate per flotilla)

Each flotilla belongs to a fleet. It has minimum cusrtomization since most is decided on the fleet screen.

- size (tiny, small, average, big, huge) [how many ships are there, compared to your total number of ships]

- maybe specialization? (like combat, recon, space marines on board, etc) ?