This could be fixed either with upping their fleet supply cost or by making them more expensive. Limiting players in how many of certain ship types they can deploy would be a bad thing, I think. People want freedom of choice, and this shouldn't be forgotten. If someone wants to build a lot of corvettes, I say why not?
Upping the supply cost could help limit the number of ships, but not enough. Theoretically, since they take 1 supply, someone can make 8,250 of these if they build nothing else. Increasing the supply to 3 drastically cuts down the problem, but then also drastically cuts down the effectiveness, I think. It also doesn't eliminate the problem.
I believe the idea behind corvettes is to pad the early fleets with sheer numbers. That works well, but when you get to larger fleet sizes, it means you can use exploits like this.
I honestly don't see how this is any different before though. Someone could just have made a massive fleet of scouts to crash the game as well.
My solution would be to add supply cost on the fly when there is excessive use of 1 ship type. Then scale that additional cost per fleet level.
So, off the top of my head, and grabbing fleet supply numbers off the wikia page, lets say that if 1 ship makes up 75% of your maximum supply, that is what we are calling the excess 'cap'. At fleet level:
- you get 100 supply, so 75 supply are 1 ship, increasing the supply of any additional same ships by 1. Total number of corvettes possible= 87.
- you get 350 total supply, so 263 supply are 1 ship, increasing the supply of any additional same ships by 2. Total number of corvettes possible= 292.
- you get 750 total supply, so 563 supply are 1 ship, increasing the supply of any additional same ships by 3. Total number of corvettes possible= 609.
- you get 1300 total supply, so 975 supply are 1 ship, increasing the supply of any additional same ships by 4. Total number of corvettes possible= 1040.
- you get 2120 total supply, so 1590 supply are 1 ship, increasing the supply of any additional same ships by 5. Total number of corvettes possible= 1678.
- you get 3210 total supply, so 2408 supply are 1 ship, increasing the supply of any additional same ships by 6. Total number of corvettes possible= 2522.
and so on... There's still a problem at the higher fleet levels; but by tweaking the 'cap' percentage you can come down harder/softer on this exploit. And your fleet supply efficiency drops (lvl1 87%->83%->81%->80%->79%->78%... using the above setup), so I think they would be making it easier to beat them by adopting this strategy.