So, having been in the beta test without fleets, I'm glad that the devs put them in since it keeps ship management at a much more macro level since the fleets removed the old problem of one random frigate going out to attack an entire fleet, but the fleets in their current implementation are just a step in the right direction, a very small step.

What's done right:
1) Fleets stay together and attack the same general group of ships

2) The Player can modify just about any ship behavior from tightness of formation to attack parameters

3) Fleets are sorted on the empire window and tacked at top

What's implemented but needs work:
1) Ships can be added to fleets, and can in fact automatically join a fleet based on their shiptype but this only works if there is already a fleet for that ship type present in system. If the system the ships are rallied to doesn't have, say a siege fleet, siege frigates will automatically join the combat fleet instead of creating a separate siege fleet. This feature is essential in large games where multiple fleets are being formed and reordered constantly

2) Fleets are dynamic, they can be added to, taken away from, or disbanded. What's missing here is that the only way to add a ship to a fleet if it doesn't auto join the fleet is to hit the create fleet button which disbands the old fleet, and forms a new one comprised of the old fleet and the new ship(s) moving the fleet from the place on the empire window I'm used to finding it at down to the bottom of the fleets list. This can make keeping my fleet's straight difficult since what i think of as first fleet might actually be fleet 8 or 6 or whatever on the empire window.

3) Fleets have a fleet symbol that is easy to locate on the battlefield. Unfortunately This symbol is not something that easily designates which fleet the symbol represents. It took me about 4 hours to figure out that the symbols had small fields of colors in them that were different for each fleet. A better designator would be the current symbol with a number in the middle instead of the starfleetish insignia that is there now. The number would of course designate fleet number, so your first fleet is 1 your second is 2 and so on.

4) Fleets execute commands as a fleet (sort of). Giving a command to a fleet's flagship effectively gives the command to the fleet, however the ships of the fleet lag behind the flagship in their execution of said commands leading to the almost inevitable destruction of a sub-capitalship flagship in a pitched battle due to the fact that the flagship is almost always 2-4 firing cycles ahead of its fleet. Now since a fleet isn't disbanded when a flag is lost, I don't care if the flagship is destroyed in combat, however, the useless waste of a ship is unacceptable to me, especially when my empire and my enemies are essentially even.

5)Health for ships is shown on the empire window. The problem here is that while the health/shields/antimatter of ships/structures is shown on the empire window, the bars are so tiny that a shield that is at 50% looks almost identical to a shield at 100%.

What's missing from the current implementation:

1) Fleets and command groups have no relation to each other. By this I mean that I can create a fleet but I have no way to access it besides selection in the empire window or on the playfield. While the empire window is a great information tool, it can't replace a single key stroke as a selection tool, especially since managing my empire usually leads to my fleets being out of view on the empire window while I manage building/upgrades on distant planets.

2) There is no auto retreat function. Since one of the neccessities of a game of this magnitude is the limitation of micro-management, an auto retreat feature for fleets and important ships within a fleet would be nice so that I wouldn't have to watch battles involving my high level cap ships like a hawk to make sure that my lvl 10 flagship doesn't get raped during a battle.

3) Fleets are not smart enough to separate when say the capital ship in the fleet decides to bomb the planet. In this situation, if my cap ships fleet has combat frigates/cruisers in it, they will simply sit in formation around the cap ship while the planet is bombed leaving logistics structures unthreatened. A much more sensible behavior would be for the fleet to split itself and allow the frigates/cruisers to attack the logistics structures while the capitals bombed the planet, or even better to allow the attack priorities of ships to be changed by the player in game so that if my objective is a raid, I can tell my ships to ignore the planet and destroy everything in orbit first, and if my objective is to destroy the planet and damn everything else, I can order the planet to the top of the attack priorities.

If you've made it this far, thanks for reading. I don't think any of these suggestions require severe code changes, or if they do there is an alternative that would be less coding intensive. Furthermore, these changes would make fleets feel more like fleets rather than glorified CTRL+# hotkey groups.