Fleet Management and the Order of Battle
or How to make large groups more plausible and cool

Allow to me start with the obligatory, Sins of a Solar Empire is an extremely exciting game, even from the beta II I can see the grand future that lays ahead of it. With that said, lets talk a little about Fleet Management.
Fleet Management is integral to any game of SINS caliber, particularly as its late game is focused around extremely large masses of ships of war of half a dozen or more classes. FM (Fleet Management), properly implemented, would allow the player the ability to choose the aggressiveness of the fleet, how willing it will expose itself to damage, when it should flee, what priority targets it would select and in broad strokes what its priorities are. FM can be accomplished in several different ways:

Formations

Implemented in several games, most notably Homeworld and its successors formations allow the player an easy way to accomplish FM with a mere click of a button. One formation should place the capital ships and cruisers with high armor/shields at the vanguard with more sensitive support ships behind and with light frigates on the wings as screens.
Another variant might place the screens of light cruisers in the front with the cruisers and capital ships securely protected in the center or rear. Regardless of their intent they should arrange the ships automatically into formation, with a minimum of interference by the player.

Order of Battle

This, behind the scenes, technique would automatically arrange fleets into positions similar to formations whenever they are placed into a group (group 1, group 2, etc). It would immediately place the frigates into their screen or rear positions (depending on whether its javelins or light frigates), capital ships into their appropriate rolls, and fights on the wings.
I'm entirely too tired of seeing my light frigates charge into battle with Guass turrets and dying in droves when a battleship placed in the vanguard could easily absorb all their damage. Order of battle would go along way to addressing that.

Stances

Another simple "singe-click" FM tool would be the ability to place grouped fleets into various stances of agression. A few examples would be:

Aggressive: Pursue all units to the limits of the gravity well regardless of risk. (The default setting currently in SINS)

Sentinel: Pursue units only in a limited range and immediately reform once they have escaped that range.

Passive: Just sit there.

Raiding: Identifcal to Agressive save for the fleet would immediately flee the gravity well if faced with a numerically surperior force.

There are of course many more options as well.

Target Priority

Ships in all grouped fleets should by default target the class they are designed to deal with. Javelins should go for capital ships, Heavy Cruisers for frigates, fighters for fighters and bombers, bombers for capital ships and cruisers. Etc.
If these options were implemented (in any number) it would go a long way to not only making the Ship to ship combat a more tactical and visceral experience it would also make fleets operating autonomously much for effective, thereby allowing the player to focus his attentions elsewhere.