I just finishing a 4 player AI game on hard difficulty, and had a good time with it.

Three things came out of it regarding movement of fleets:

1. First is an earlier recommendation regarding scout ships using mine detection functionality: slow their movement to that of another frigate type. Reason: they're too fast and move to the leading edge of a battle tooquickly, taking fire from major enemy fleet eleemnts. They should not behave this way--they should be support/detection units when assigned to a fleet and when mine detection functionality is flagged on.

2.Second and equally important when attacking a system having mine defenses or enemies that can toss mines at you (advent homers): in the fleet control panel provide a flag that makes the fleet move at teh speed of the slowest vessel in the formation. THis will help fleets maintain positioning and coherency, with good detection and fields of fire.

3. Consider changing movement of ships such that they turn first and then move. Presently, they turn while accelerating, moving in wide arcs. The arc is very large if the vessel has a low turning radius and high speed. This would be difficult to implement as balance would be needed between large cap ships and smaller frigates. Logically, if they were in a fleet, moving together, the frigates would turn quickly and wait for caps to complete their turn prior to moving.

Number 3 is the most difficult to implement and might not be realistic given how ships interact. Maybe caps can do an emergency turn while not firing or something, to reflect energy being routed to drive systems/inertial dampers/etc.