The counterplay, obviously, if to have spare tugs/docks, tankers and bases. That's more deepness in the sky.
If the "counterplay" is "more micromanagement", I cannot say I am in favor of it. Presently we do need all of these things, in some degree or another, for good mechanical reasons that make sense. Saying "okay, but now you need more because of RNG" does not make sense, at least from the perspective of good gameplay.
Frankly I'm very surprised that smb thinks like this, because for me it's surprizes that makes game more like a story.
Because now I know that nearly every case my ship was caught by critical failure - it was my failure, my stupidity or carelessness, and just I cannot forget about it, and it's therefore not a story at all.
I don't understand this. If my ship runs out of MSP or suffers a critical failure due to something I did - poor design, pushing it beyond its operating limits, and so on - then it is my failure, and knowing this is a possibility makes the decisions that lead to those cases interesting. There is a tangible story which has led to this, or which could have led to this. It's not "my failure" if my engine blows up due to a random dice roll. While I can make up a narrative on the spot about a surprise meteor shower or something, it's not interesting to me as a story - something randomly happened, and I have to make up a post-fact reason for it. A good narrative IMO has a meaningful cause and effect which feeds back to the gameplay.
I would liken to something Steve said about why he doesn't just "simulate" the NPRs to prevent increment slowdowns. There is a difference in the game narrative between jumping into a new system, seeing a wreck, and thinking "oh, the game has generated a random wreck for me to loot" versus seeing a wreck and knowing that some mysterious battle has gone on here. The former requires the player to make something up to cover the game mechanics, the latter places the player into the story being told by the game which is more immersive and emergent.
Frankly I don't think large, multirole ships need help. Smaller specialized ships may give better performance, but they are also easier to target
I think it's obviously the opposite - they are harder to target, especially with missiles.
I misspoke slightly, I mean that small specialized ships are easier to single out and destroy to eliminate a key capability.
Of course smaller ships are harder to target on sensors, but I think usually when we talk about such ships we are talking about sizes >100 HS at which point sensor resolutions usually tend to not matter very much, as ~100 is a pretty typical largest resolution, so even then the difference is not great. For ships below 100 HS I think the efficiency losses from such small size become significant enough that the discussion is quite different.
I do agree that things are generally balanced as it is. I'm not sure that auxiliary and commercial ships are very relevant to that discussion though, the design of such ships should always follow the needs of the fleet, frankly a gigantic multi-role auxiliary ship seems to me absurd unless you need such a thing to support an even bigger capital ship, and I don't think new mechanics are needed to make such a thing viable. The current paradigm makes much sense IMO.