These are my observation from tinkering around with the battle viewer and trying different things.
Selecting ships that stay as a group will make you win allot more so designating ships as Capital, Escort and Guardian is the best and most efficient option.
Ships suicide themselves when fighting with a starbase, even support ships do this. Long range and support ship should stay behind the starbase while escorts and defenders screen it, but never should they engage the enemy and leave the area of protection of the starbase.
There need to be more tactic in the battle viewer. Right now ships just rush straight in without regard of ranges or anything. Ships with long range weapons do not seem to even wish to stay at range to snipe at their targets.
Small, fast and maneuverable ships just move super fast straight into enemy fire without any regard of their own safety. Fast ships MUST move along the flanks to protect them from the majority of the enemy fire and NOT engage until your capital ships engaged. If you only have fast nimble ships they should still try to outflank the enemy.
The way I see it is that larger ships is more or less always more powerful than smaller ships because of above behavior such as no regard for range and that there is no penalties for ships shooting behind them.
I suggest that you introduce a simple mechanic where ships get full range on their weapons when fire straight ahead and up to 25% range of fire them straight backward or the power of the weapon is reduced or both range AND power or it can depend on the weapon type. Something that make smaller more maneuverable ships important.
Introduce super heavy weapon that can't fit on smaller ships with different traits, such as super inaccurate at maneuverable targets but devastating shooting at larger ships. Something more is needed to make the tactical battle viewer harder to predict.
Ships should try to stay away from effective enemy fire and if the above is introduced ships would also have to divide their fire up among many different ships, they hardly do that now.
My conclusion is... there need to be something more in the battle viewer. Ships just act like kamikaze pilots trying to shoot at whatever priority they have at point blank range.
I would like to know other peoples experiences with the battle viewer and if they are similar to mine...
