I love the idea of newtonian space combat but hoo boy is this a UX nightmare. It takes me about a minute of fiddling with tiny pips floating in 3d space before I give up and hand it over to the AI, who is virtually guaranteed to do... ahem... questionable things with my ships.
It's deeply unpleasant to play, and that sort of pains me to say because of how much I like the rest of this game.
Some concrete suggestions:
It would be really, really really nice to have some sort of intermediate point between full AI and manually controlling every individual detail. Simple commands like "advance on target", "retreat from target", "attempt to flank target", etc, would be amazing.
Assigning ships to a group that duplicates all the orders for the other ships as well, manually dragging each pip for 10+ ships is incredibly tedious, especially when you want to have all of them do the same thing.
AI that behaves according to the weapons on your ships would also just be a nice feature. Watching my fleet of particle-beam ships perform the AI's weird "keep-away" dance was baffling. You have short range nose weapons, guys! Just go TOWARDS the enemy!
This is early access and I don't expect things to be perfect or anything near finished, so this isn't a critique really; more just felt compelled to say something.
EDIT: I just realized that I had completely overlooked that the ship design-class actually had an impact on AI behavior (egg on my face for sure), this should hopefully help
Hoo boy space combat
Re: Hoo boy space combat
My advice? Don't manoeuvre. As you correctly point out, the UI is quite bad for manipulating even single ship's trajectories as it is, never mind fleet. Until we can click-to-select a nav point and have some kind of improved method of rotating the pips, it's better to leave things largely alone.
Just order your ships into a high wall and drift steady as it goes towards the enemy, they are in a position to mutually support each other with their light lasers / PD and are generally pointed towards the direction you want them to go.
There *are* two AI commands that you should use, padlock keeps ship's nose pointed to the primary target losing ability to manoeuvre otherwise, which we're not going to do anyways. Ram causes your ship to try to ram the enemy ship as implied, this works as a "close to target" - command, as much as we've got one.
So, on the initial approach, just keep going and the lighter xeno ships, destroyer and smaller, will wobble all over the place and fly past your formation. Use padlock to tell ships keep their cannons pointed at targets as appropriate. When you've dealt with targets in front of you, order your ships to ram the enemies now behind you and the AI will manoeuvre to turn your ships around, which will point your cannons towards the enemy and close in. You should have adequate armour front and rear to weather hits.
Just order your ships into a high wall and drift steady as it goes towards the enemy, they are in a position to mutually support each other with their light lasers / PD and are generally pointed towards the direction you want them to go.
There *are* two AI commands that you should use, padlock keeps ship's nose pointed to the primary target losing ability to manoeuvre otherwise, which we're not going to do anyways. Ram causes your ship to try to ram the enemy ship as implied, this works as a "close to target" - command, as much as we've got one.
So, on the initial approach, just keep going and the lighter xeno ships, destroyer and smaller, will wobble all over the place and fly past your formation. Use padlock to tell ships keep their cannons pointed at targets as appropriate. When you've dealt with targets in front of you, order your ships to ram the enemies now behind you and the AI will manoeuvre to turn your ships around, which will point your cannons towards the enemy and close in. You should have adequate armour front and rear to weather hits.