I was doing a little “Let’s see if I can break the game” testing, and I ran across something that might come in handy.
This shot was taken in the scenario where the weapon ranges are decreased. I was using a ship design with no engines, lots of armor, a few weapons, and auto-repair. As you can see, the problem was that all of the enemy ships were outside of my firing range, but they were unable to hurt the ships I had designed. After about 15 minutes, I stopped the fight.
Any chance in setting up some sort of real-time limit to the scenario, with the winner being whoever did the most damage to the other fleet?