Impaler wrote:My opinion is Combat/NonCombat is good enough for now.
What sorts of non-combat fleets are there? Just colony ships? It seems a bit odd to call the icon the "non-combat ships" icon when it's only applicable to a single type of ship. I imagine the vast majority of fleets would be combat, so a classification primarily by combat / non-combat isn't very useful...
To show Size add up what ever criteria we use to size Fleets (by ship type #/cost/mass units what ever) find the largest Fleet that a Player Controls. Now Mark all fleets by their RELATIVE size to that largest Fleet.
This could be confusing... For a player's own fleets, the size of a fleet's icon would have no reliable meaning in situations in which there is a single large fleet in the empire that's in a combat situation. As soon as that fleet gets attacked, it's size is drastically reduced, and suddenly all other fleets get promoted two icons in size? ... Even worse is the other player's fleets... If their icon size is based relative to your fleet sizes, you'd need icons for > 100% the size of your biggest fleet.. up to 10000% or so. The alternative of basing their icons on only their fleet sizes is even worse, in that the size of the icon you see has little to no strategic informatin conveyed, and can changed rapidly (as in the big fleet being reduced example above) without you having any indication of why it happened.
IMO, it'd be better to base fleet icons on the average size of your fleets, or your number of ships per planet, or something like that, so that the sizings aren't so sensitive to temporary groupings of ships. It might be even better to base the averages for the whole galaxy... though that would tend to give you strategic information that you shouldn't be able to know...
Rather than having 5 designations, each covering 20 % of the size of your best fleet, I'd suggest having ~10 different icons that are one half to one full order of magnitude apart (Icons change when fleets "power" is 3 times bigger than the previous icon minimum size). (Could use factors of 2, if preferred).
If have a reasonable number of icons in a logarithmic system like this, it doesn't matter how big the galaxy is, there will never be enough fleet power to use up all the icons.
Of course that does mean you lose some of the fine distinction between icon ranges... so maybe scaling the ranges of the logarithmic icons so that your empire's average fleet is the middlemost icon, and ranking all fleets according to that benchmark (using logarithmic icons) would be best.