I'm still playing the latest patch of vanilla Sins since I had bought the physical copy from long ago. Anyways, I suppose the mechanics is not that different from the latter expansions like Entrenchment and Diplomacy. Anyways I wanted to become more familiar with managing my fleets and control groups.

For example, I built up 5 Cielos, 24 Kodiaks, 24 Percherons, 18 Hoshikos, 18 LRMs, and 20 flak frigates. I wanted them all to function as a single fleet so I just select one (either Cielo or Kodiak) to act as a flag ship leading these said units. I had one problem where the fleet seemingly was not functioning the way I wanted it to or expecting each class of ships to fulfill the role they were supposed to be doing. I think it was a mistake to select the whole fleet via icon and command it to focus fire primary threats. All of a sudden the light carriers weren't launching their strike craft and is constantly in a state of reforming fleets. The Hoshikos were probably not repairing properly either and my fleet gets decimated.

If I were to fix this issue, would you recommend that on top of assigning all of these units into a single fleet, create control groups for each group of ships in the same class? Or should I create different fleets of the same class? If using the former (single fleet + multiple control groups) what kind of fleet settings should I use so they maintain their proper functions (i.e. Kodiaks assault threats, Hoshikos support with repairs, carriers keep their distance and attack with strikecraft, etc.) I don't want the other ship classes to start acting strange when I micromanage a group to do something in particular.

Also there's another issue to keep in mind which is the autojoin fleet function. By default, any newly created ship will have this one on. For a single fleet composition, it's not such a problem. But if I went with the multi-fleet approach separated by class, would the game try to group like-classes? I've read from others that they were having issues with 2 or more composite fleets and their ships joining the wrong fleet.