Hi well anyway I'm one of those newbies who made a very general post that quietly died and decided to make a more specific one.

Anyway to get the ball rolling, some of the attack priorities are a little odd right now, for example flak frigates especially wont attack enemy fighters/bombers first off they tend to attack whatever the rest of the fleet is attacking.

A great boon for unit control would be if you were able to order units to defend each other, IE follow as close as possible and attack anything that attacks the units they are defending.
This would mean I wouldn't have to babysit my flak frigates as they wander away from siege frigates that they are meant to be defending from those pesky bombers.

Another issue I have is that almost every ship will actively turn around to attack Gauss turrets they are already out of the range of, if you let them. Personally I think that is the only purpose of Gauss turrets, to fool the units into wasting health/time engaging them, with as much health as the turrets have, its almost always more advantageous just to fly past them.
Also as the turrets range doesn't extend to the edge of the sector, so all I have to do to avoid getting too beat up by them is order my fleet to go around/over them. So I generally don't like it when my fleet keeps on trying to attack Gauss turrets I've already bypassed!
Also I realise that setting my units to "Attack in local area" would mean that they wouldn't attack the Gauss turrets, but It would also mean that they wouldn't attack new ships coming for my siege frigates from a different system.

Maybe that is the solution to my problem, however in my opinion that solution is a work around. The best solution for me would be that if the turrets are out of range, the close combat units simply ignore them until everything else in the sector is dead and buried.