Corvette spam to slow/crash the game

I've had this happen to me in a 2v1 situation with a TEC Loyalist opponent (We couldn't make headway into his territory because of his buffs.)

I swear to almighty god... It was already getting bad, and then he jumps his fleet of an Ankylon, 80 LRMs and over 600 Corvettes and I thought my computer was going to explode. (I exaggerate, but nonetheless, my ally had it even worse.)

All the while he taunted us and told us to quit repeatedly. Had I actually lost because of that, I'd have been fuming. Seriously, I hate these guys.

Yes, Corvettes do cause a tremendous amount of lag in multiplayer games. 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? Maybe limit them only in multiplayer to address the lag issues.

The corvettes need to go.

They do. They go really fast.  They have fighter movement!  Oh wait...

A corvette base ship with a limited number of launches would work.

Thats actually not a bad idea. Shrink corvettes down to s/c size and make them a third s/c lthat only carriers and s/b's can launch.

They couldn't go boom any faster.

Btw any wonder why some of us steer clear of any multiplayer?

I've never wondered (even though I like playing online).

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.

Making them more significantly expensive in cost or logistics essentially changes them to a different type of unit and will require more balancing. 

Making the Yugo cost the same as a Honda isn't really a solution. What might work would be if you could buy ability use per unit--which unfortunately I imagine we can't.

make corvettes like a fighter squad that only replenishes in a friendly gravity well.  They replenish at a 50% rate when enemies are in the gravity well.

They would only have an initial cost and they wouldn't be a really good first investment as they could be retreated and replenished for free.  This would make them better against titans as well, since you wouldn't have to deal with massive attrition losses if you just retreat the squad of corvettes before it gets wiped out.  Also, this makes managing corvettes even easier making them a more effective use of a players time.

Also, sith lord spamming that many scouts doesn't hurt the game nearly as bad, since you can only spam 1000 of them.  With corvettes, you can spam 2000 of them, that is twice the problem.  My computer handled the 2000 corvettes just fine until WINDOWS bit the bullet and the game stopped responding.  So, no you are in fact off the mark on your comment. 

All i'm offering is the same solution to the problem that the developers have already solved with fighters/bombers.  We can have thousands of them in a game at once and still have little lag.  Not so true of corvettes.