I do know reducing the amount will change the income rates. That has been confirmed by Yarlen. Though I dont think its a major difference seeing we have reduce it to 1 in DS and trade ports still do great.

Sounds like a good test to conduct to see if the game is playable without the ships. I know Pirate Corsars might get a bit lost at first but dont think minus any hardcode issues there be any problems. You might see a reduction in trade port income. But that might be a good trade off for better gameplay.

I think it might make things a bit slower in the money making market for inter-empire trading. On a related note to the 1(or few) trade ships, do you think it would be possible to add a .001 diplomacy bonus for each successful trip a ship makes from your trade port to an ally's? I can already see it being abused with making about 8 trade ports on a planet neighboring an ally's but in normal usage do you think it would be a decent addition for diplomacy? I mean, everyone's happy when they get their deliveries ; and even now in real world diplomatic situations/business transactions, the mood of the receiver always improves when getting what they asked for from a neighbor.

well, if it's lag you're hunting, a lot can be reduced from the game's startup itself, aswell as late game empitre tree trimming and condensing. All of the mentioned is done with the diplomacy.user settings file in the appdata/local/ironclad/sinsofasolarempire/settings  I mapped it out so people can alter them safely. There is even a few in there to reduce the amount of "pretty lights" from weapons and skills that reduce, make the empire tree stack 90+ instead of 10(recommend 50 personally, works and seems safe enough so far) but the cargo ships are a tiny part of the overall drag in late game. Try playing with some of these settings and try out another game, the stuff in my thread are color coded for easy searching through the lines https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/408207 yes, I bumped this shamelessly