Micromanagement?

first you should define the difference you mean by tactis and strategy.

anyways, your ships generally handle things on their own.  a lot of peopel are handling 2 or more battles at once on larger maps, and you can't micro them all.  your ships will activate abilities if necessary, and if you force is adequate and well balanced, it will defeat the opposition.  they only thing you have to do is just know when to retreat.  if you are glancing over your huge map and see a force is under attack, then yes you'll have to micro that and reatreat, but there shouldn't be a whole lot more than that.

Macro elements (building structures, doing research, producing ships) should not take very long if you hotkey things correctly. I think most likely the problem is that you aren't yet familiar enough with all the options, so you spend time deciding what to build/research. Obviously, when you're starting, this is very important to do, probably more important than micromanaging, unless it's a pivotal battle (which doesn't happen particularly often). Once you get the hang of how to do your macro elements quickly, you will have much more time to micro battles, which can definitely give you a good edge. Almost all capship abilities can be microed much better than the autocast.

I will focus on the battle only so much as to send capital ships, bombers and anti-structure cruisers towards any starbases, and the rest of the fleet towards everything else (I found this minimizes losses of frigates/cruisers).  Past that I reply on the ships' basic programming to clear the gravity well for me.  A well balanced fleet, with some creative key assinments, can take on anything.

I perfer large, 50 plus planet maps.  There you can get away with just sending your fleet somewhere and letting it do its thing.  On smaller maps you must keep track of your ships, as resources are more scarce and enimies more close.  The rare occasions I play a small map, I think of each gravity well as a single map (where one has to pay more attention to individual units, orders and locations).

For large fleets I have multiple hotkeys:

"1" - Main Assault/Core Fleet: a well balanced fleet capable of complete autonomy. Caps, frigates, cruisers and anti-structure.

"2" - Secondary Fleet/Support Fleet (Reserves/Nat'l Guard): another well balanced fleet, about 1/3 to 1/2 the size of '1'.  Better suited to defensive purposes. Caps, frigates, cruisers. Lacks anti-structure support.

"3" - 1 & 2 put together

"4" - just the capital ships from 1

"5" - just the frigates/cruisers from 1

"6" - just the anti-structure cruisers from 1

7,8,9 & 0 -tasked to construction cruisers, coloney frigates, and scouts as needed.

There's a lot of micromanagement to be done. Putting ships with multiple weapon banks into the middle of a fight, microing strikecraft to hold position close to LRMs/Caps you want to destroy (fighters against LRMs, bombers against Caps ofc), microing your support-cruiser for better efficiency (i.e. repulse/shield projection, sabotage bots of hoshis, nano armor/distortion field, etc etc) and of course your cap ship abilities.

Against human opponents you need to at least...

- micro your Fighters to attack targets outside Flak range and keep moving them if the Flak follow

- turn off Capital ship ability autocasts and use the abilities yourself

- retreat your capitals to repair bays before they are destroyed

Online requires a lot of micro. 

Vs. AI, not really necessary I find.