How long should battles last?

[Saintduiex]

Bigger engagement will not increase the time significantly, unless HP is tweaked. To the contrary it might reduce the battle time.

If it takes 10 mins to sink 1 ship in a duel, it will actually be destroyed faster in a group combat, due to focus fire.

Assembling in a good position will take longer, but once fleets are in firing distance, it will actually be more hectic and fast than in a duel.

This has been my observation of fleets vs 1-1 to date. The longest so far have been 1-1 tacking duel's that seemed to last much longer than the chaos of fleet-fleet. While the Fleets in the PvE are much more coordinated at the outset, the multiplayer PvP tend to be chaos from the start. I'm thinking that over time "generally accepted best practices" will begin to spring up as the overall experience levels rise and intra-fleet communications are used.

This may ultimately lead to longer games if there are experienced fleets on both sides while it could be a fairly quick shorter affair when one fleet has much more experience working as a fleet.

As a byproduct I would think that the most successful Navies, Cartels, Associations, Teams (or whatever is ultimately rolled out in the game) would engage in some pretty extensive practice sessions. So I think that this, more than any other single aspect, will be the largest influence to the battle durations.

[Mirones]

1 1/2h should be normally enough imo