There are repair ships and they would finally be put to good use. And it also adds more strategy and tactics to the game which is what makes the game more fun.

Having them be repaired in friendly territories make sense, but in enemy territory where there is no support they would have to lean on repair ships.

And if people still want the auto repair there, why not add it as an option. This would please both groups.

I agree completly and nano bots are in sworms not just 1 there are millions of them so repaires wouldent take that long and there would be lots of scrap left over after a battle which can be used to fix ships. but i do think its a good idea to not stop repaires completly in battle but maby slow them down cs damage controle teames would go about the ship patching holes and stuf

Battle damage repair during fighting are the most critical repairs a ship's company can make. That's why entire teams are pre-designated to perform damage control and material is carried to make critical repairs.

Having said that, to expect a severely damaged ship to bring itself to 100% readiness is not reasonable.

As a suggestion, since the "health indicator" of the ships already go from green -> yellow -> red, limit the amount of repair a ship can self-perform to:

Green -> can fully self repair

Yellow -> can self repair 75% of lost points (or to the border of green/yellow if individual ship 'current' max hitpoints aren't a variable you want to maintain)

Red -> can self repair 33% of lost hitpoints (or to the border of red/yellow)

Having a repair facility available would allow full recovery of hitpoints. Whether a robo-cruiser (with the bots available) would allow full hitpoint recovery or just moving past either the red/yellow or yellow/green boundary I leave for discussion.

In either case, hitpoint recovery rates should be significantly higher at a repair facility.

While I know a lot of people like the high auto repair feature as it really helps ships last longer in combat put also allows them to keep pressing the attack. I think in the end this does two things for the game. One is it rewards the winner and larger ships as their fleet quickly heals after victory and larger ships are harder to destroy so if they don't have to stop for very long or return to base to heal then they can easily keep going forward. The other thing is I think the auto heal is one of the reasons the games tend to take so long and late game turns into one big siege fest after another. With ships fully decked out they heal at rather impressive rates and have even more shields and hitpoints then early game.

You have people pointing out how ships have damage control teams to repair the ship in combat and fix things after a battle. Well that is true but they can't make full repairs and they aren't expected to. Their job is to patch holes in the ship and repair key equipment so the ship can stay in the fight. The hitpoints in my opinion are suppose to represent the armor plating on a ship which the damage control teams aren't suppose to handle or focus on. As for the nanobots working so fast and being able to salvage debris fields up so fast to patch a ship as good as new doesn't make sense. I mean if they had that kind of tech they wouldn't need repair station or repair ships.

Anyway here are some of my ideas on how the repair should be handled.
1)Ships can repair up to 50% HP at the current repair speeds no matter where they are. This represents the damage crews ability to patch up the ship. And maybe with research increase to like 75-80% but at slower rate once over 50%.

2)Ships repair at about half their current rate when in combat up to 50%

3)Ships can repair up to 100% HP when in a friendly system with a shipyard.

4)Repair stations affect the whole system not just the small circle around them because it's a pain to micromanage and move your ships over there. They of course still increase ship repair rates but their effects are halved when the ship is in combat.

5)Repair ship already exist but may need some tweaking if it's going to be responseable to repairing the who fleet as the way it's setup now with the spend energy and repair 20 hp/sec is more for combat repairs not whole fleet repairing which would take a LONG time. So maybe it has a passive ability that simply allows the ships in fleet to heal to full health but at half their rate once their over 50% HP.

I think this kinda setup along with lower heal rates during combat will help pickup the pace of combat and reduce the trench warfare feeling the game tends to have in the later stages.