there is more elegant and creative ways to solve this solve this problem .

im going to refer to master of Orion 2 .

in a game i was playing one time the Antares attacked me mid game so i really didnt have uber ships that i usually had .
but i had a plethra of weaponry available to me.
One being stasis beams so instead of building a bunch of ships to try and defeat the Antares i built several ships around the ideology of quickly moving in and placing the Antares ships into stasis so that way i could fight the fleet more easily and also capture a Antares ship.

my points are that i was limited in my response to the threat due to not having the resources necessary to create a uber fleet. but i was able to over come this because i was able to use clever design to defeat the threat because i had options available to me .

this is what GSB needs . it needs more player options which means greater diversity in modules and hulls . to create your desired effects you could create hulls and modules that are exclusive to one another .

for example we lay out several hulls

assault class hulls these hulls are designed to fit the heavy weaponry in the game . these ships have power bonuses and maybe even range bonuses
they will have a drawback for they will be slow and easy to hit . i dont expect any plasma torpedoes to miss these ships less they are packing the requisite defenses. or better yet have the following.

logistics class hulls these ships are able to equip technolgy that enable accompying ships easier target aquistion maybe damge bonuses and of course defense bonuses .

Traige class these hulls are able to equip remote sheild extenders and repair systems these keep the fleet alive they provide sheild bonuses as well equipping technolgy that remote repairs ships.

that would at least give you fleets that should have at least 2 types of hulls in them .

to get more frigates into battle there should also be hulls and modules designed in the same spirit . they would be designed to exploit weakness of the larger hull clases .

specialized ecm frigates would be a major pain as well as logistics disruption
also frigates that intefere with triage efforts and of course leathal antifrigate systems .

that way people who use these in battles will be giving an advantage over people who dont

so now you have very potent reasons to use at least three or four hull classes in your fleet.

and the final which i feel is good enough is fighters and bombers these all ready seem pretty potent as is so i see no need to radically change them .

so that should give you all the diversty in fleets you are looking for.

of course its not easy but at least it gives the players more options in creating fleets instead of limiting them even more.

diversifying the modules and making them exclusive to certain hulls would give you the diversification in fleets that you are seeking .

However what it sounds like is more you’re worried about depth of the game. I don’t think that’s going to have an easy solution because the game is specifically telling me what the enemy will throw at me, it really does boil down to “more rocks or scissors” questions.

I’d recommend some kind of a balance system that really encourages variety and specializing. Perhaps hulls or modules with large bonuses to X while simultaneously having penalties to Y – if you want a bunch of repair ability and a bunch of guns, make it preferable to have a repairboat and a gunboat instead of two repair/gun ships.

Or perhaps some kind of diminishing returns behavior, where diversifying is actually useful rather than being suboptimal.

Ex.
You can’t deploy more fighters/ships because you are out of pilots, ship icon painted in red.
You can’t deploy cruisers because the map dosn’t allow them, ship icon in dark grey.
You can’t deploy this ship because you don’t have enough money, ship icon in yellow.
And so on.