After reviewing your criticism we decided to roll back the update 0.20.5 due to a very specific issue: Captains now costing lots and lots of upkeep. This made it impossible for players with fleets of lots of small ships to keep up financially, potentially leaving their ships stranded without crews and screwing up their saves. We apologize if this patch resulted in crews leaving your ships, we rolled it back as soon as we realized what damage it could do.
We wanted to push fleets and fleet management a little more to mid and late game, because we feel that that's the place for it, not early game. Early game in Avorion should be focused on building and improving your first ship. What we underestimated, is how many players there are who had already built ships and fleets in the early game and how this change impacted them.
Nobody likes grinding, and we do want you to be able to automate some tedious tasks towards mid and end game. So this change has nothing to do with us wanting you to grind even more. Automation, especially with the latest update, has become a very important gameplay pillar in Avorion and is here to stay. (Just please keep in mind that having hundreds of ships is not possible due to hardware and engine restrictions, the game engine simply isn't made for that kind of simulation.)
We stand with what we think about early, mid and late game and we will be looking into making fleets more of a mid, late or end game focused feature, but not at the cost of having the early game be a tedious grind, because nobody wants that. Instead, we want to give you more challenges to overcome, sinks to invest your resources into, and to give you goals you can work towards. We want founding new ships to give you a sense of progress, every new ship you found to be more special, and not just yet another mindless minion doing tedious tasks.