That is an excellent idea. I am very bad at fighting the challenges and campaign, but I have noticed that on cadet I play, get up a good base, and then I just get pounded. Drawing from challenges is a great idea.
In real life, it is not necessarily a no-win situation. IRL, the enemy wold be split into the races and not be able to have all of the planets available for movement. IRL, they can’t switch fleets in a planet that is cut off and doesn’t have a shipyard. IRL, You could flank them and use more in-depth tactics. IRL, there would be supplies and moral to think about and you could wear down the enemy’s fleet and entire empire. But also IRL, cliff has so many other things to do and this is a major job. Yet another reason I am taking Programming 1 for high school 
A few points.
First, the enemy fleets in campaign do not really move, at least not until they attack. The computer just builds up points at all AI-controlled planets based on a threat formula, and then whether it attacks you or you attack it, it buys a fleet with those points and you fight the battle. This can happen even at planets with no building facilities. After you have fought a battle, however, that fleet is locked in place, and then either stays in place to defend that system or moves on to attack one of yours, depending on how much time you give it to decide and what level you are at. But an enemy planet with no build facilities can still accumulate threat points and buy an attack/defence fleet, no matter how isolated it is.
To make it worse, apparently the AI doesn’t have to pay maintenance. So once it buys a huge fleet, that fleet sits there until you destroy it.
Finally, I believe that the campaign fleets already draw from challenge fleets, as long as they meet certain “non-spam” criteria. Not that those are necessarily as strong as might be desired. It is still possible to encounter a fleet that is 80% fighters, or one that has a bunch of tanks. One of those can ruin your whole day.
I have encountered times when there is an order fleet I cannot defeat, and after a while, it just went away. It didn’t attack, I i didn’t destroy it, just next time I went on a suicide attack of the system it wasn’t there, just a little empire fleet.
I don’t remember ever seeing that happen (for one thing, I almost always get attacked again right away, even if I remove all ships from the vicinity of the enemy planet). So, a few questions; at what level were you playing, how far did you pull back, and how many turns elapsed between your first and second attacks? Oh, and did you send Cliffski a burnt offering in the meantime?
I kept ships next to the system, and it was at cadet. Idk the the number of turns, but there were many attacks, All ended in retreat.
I just finished the campaign on Admiral (as the swarm incase it matters).
It seemed to me like the only time I was ever in danger of losing or even getting pushed back significantly was near the start. After I had about 8 planets the rest of the campaign was just a very long grind, still kind of fun but repetitive. I ran into only a few fleets later on in the game that were even dangerous to mine. It was hectic near the start running into 14000+ point fleets when you’re still in the 4000 range but the challenge didn’t seem to scale to the rate at which resources were accumulated. As a result the ending was underwhelming.
I kind of like that the campaign forces you to make generalist fleets but at the same time it does limit the variety in ship designs you will run into somewhat.
I am unsure exactly how the enemy fleets are created/chosen (All I know is that they are based off other players fleets), but do you think that some mechanic could be implemented when the AI is down to a single planet that causes the last fleet to gain a lot of strength to avoid situations like the attached picture for the final battle?
Looks at picture
Never ever in my entire life saw so many frigs!
Looks at swarm
-Ohh yeah baby, we are gona win! 
Looks at empire
-Oh…my…gawd… we are sooooo screwed D:
You’ve clearly never seen my negative cost ships…
so, Velensk… who won that battle? xD
if i were to play that battle, the emps would have won. without any loss… 
Well, a person can’t be creating mod items all the time, with one’s nose buried in an Excel spreadsheet. Actually playing the game has to enter at some point, you know? Just sayin’. 
Using Stock fleet designs will shorten the campaing lowering Player interest in a repeat playability of the campaign.
Like all Strategy games, your forces begin to over power the enemy late game due to your larger never ending resource consumption, and ending the game at a faster rate and lowering your excitement. How can we improve on this? If you take technology into consideration and defense, your homeworld would be the strongest compared to your outlying controlled systems. Since the Campaign is designed to take existing player fleet designs, the AI should compensate and defend against your large fleet with something of a similar size. The result is that as you progress through the campaign, the opposing fleet size should get larger and larger. I also want to point out that I didn’t factor in AI aggro and when they fight back.
One thing I would like to see is consistant Race control. If I fight a system with one race, I don’t want to see another race be the offensive race when I’m defending. There should be some sector race control where that race controls a number of planets that are grouped together. I guess I can design my own system to do that.
or have an “odyssey” mode, where you start with a ton of credits and have to build a fleet that can go through multiple planets and you cannot build new ones, though you can capture ships and repair ships.Then maybe when you get to a certain place, maybe your home world, you win. You go through a map with multiple paths, and each takes you eventually by some route to the homeworld. Then you would truly need develop multi-purpose balanced fleets. It would be kind of like survival, excpet the race is always different, you can repair ships between waves, and you can rearrange them. The similarity is endless waves of fleets, and you can’t deploy new ships.
Actually this could be partially be done with modding because of the new support for multiple maps. So you could create a new one with those paths or maybe just one path. You start with a ton of credits, pilots, and rookies and none of the planets produce any crew or rookies, so you have credits for repairs but no crew or pilots for new ships.
That’s not a bad idea. Fancy knocking it up?
first I need to figure out how to get the new campaign features on a mac, it said there was an update but then nothing happened and the only file I can find to install the new maps is a .exe, which is about 0% compatible with mac os x
I think I saw something like that in support, I should go check.
Wow. Back in 1986, I dumped Mac as my personal computing platform for pretty much this same reason (and I really loved my little 512K Mac). Amazing that things haven’t changed.
I love mac, and I’ve used it my whole life, and while I have education in vista from my old private school, xp from my current broke public school, and windows 7 from friends, I still feel most comfortable and productive on mac, even though there is less support. I could install bootcamp, but I’m too lazy 
or I could buy something like Crossover, which doesn’t require buying another OS, but I tried the demo and made no sense, wouldn’t even open a .exe
Vista!?! Melt that machine down for scrap. XP is good, and Win7 is actually fine, but I haven’t hated an OS like I do Vista since Win 3.11. Fortunately, my only Vista machine committed suicide out of shame, so I’m back to XP and Win7. Well, except for a Win 95 machine I keep around just to run some really old games…
I hated Mac for its animated interface.
I prefer OS that sits in the background with as little “smart tools” or “babying” as possible. Probably why I am still using window XP 64 bit.
mac can be very functional too, you just gotta use it right
And if you’re judging it on the graphics, well…
Please, folks, let’s not turn this into a computer OS debate. We’re getting waaaay off-topic here. If I want to read partisan cheerleading for an OS or selective nitpicking against an OS, I can read it at Slashdot. 