With a few dozen hours under my belt.. i see combat has become very.. "Spartacus swinging his sword left and right as to not give the enemies an opening". That's my best way of putting it.
Before, it was akin to a battlefield, individual battles happening in the greater fight. But they seem rather focused on one or two points now, one of them often being the player (points which all the enemy ships apparently are aware of, judging by the Harpoon spam coming off screen from a group of ships which weren't even attacking you). I think this is because all AI plays it quite 'safe' now and mechanical. While this encourages a lot more ship use to give enemies fewer 'focus points', and i guess this was implemented to allow less player ships to be lost by the AI, i can't help but see a downgrade in the 'fun' of the chaotic combat before.
This also shows in the lack of a 'flow' of battle. It used to be that sometimes i'd have to reinforce a point, or move my ship over, generally travel around the battlefield. That made flying destroyers or even frigates sometimes preferable because you could influence different fights within the larger battlefield. But right now, it seems i just have to hope to guess which side 90% the enemy fleet is going to come in at, and try to flank the densely-compacted blob of death. A few hardy frigates which i hope will peel off and get the attention of at least a few frigates, and if they meet the enemy fleet face on since i didn't guess the side right.. hope for it to be salvageable.
Excuse the "soft" description but that's how it feels now. Feels like i'm fighting a hivemind, linked and synched ships, instead of individual ships or small clusters of ships within the enemy fleet. If i haphazardly overextend, simple human error, which is easy given how speed and vector is quite relative an 'unseen' in SS, almost the entire enemy fleet will let me know i have to reload the game.