If a ship is set to never attack "X" ship but the battle ends up with only enemy X remaining, then the ship obviously will attack it. I'd rather see this option as a way you can tell your brain damaged frigades to steer clear of the damn [Redacted] flagships without setting fleet-wide avoid orders than "my Aneurism inducing Wolf frigade did not blindly charge straight into that 4 tach lance Paragon and that's why I lost".
The "target retention" slider would actually work wonders on big ships. They usually have a smaller ship on its last legs but then decide to do a 180 in order to chase the itty bitty destroyer nibbling at its buttocks. It's going to do what you tell it to and that in my book is a giant step in the right direction. You can already put a reckless officer into your battleship and regret it later, a slider setting just that would help control the behaviour better.
I think there are lots of scenarios where some behavior would represent an improvement, but there are also scenarios where that same behavior would represent a significantly worse strategy. For instance, sure, longer target retention would eliminate some scenarios where capital ships would get distracted by frigates, but it also creates new issues where your capital ship chases its target into the middle of the enemy fleet and suicides, or ignores a hound with an assault chaingun and loses all its rear armor and engine HP. These decisions have to be made contextually, they can't be set to hard values before the battle. "Aggression" is just an abstract measure of how the AI makes those contextual decisions. Also, you can easily prevent a lot of 'distraction' issues by using escorts. The escorting ships will fend off flankers and the main ship will not worry about the flankers anywhere near as much.
Your other example has the same issues. You definitely don't want your wolf to suicide into a radiant, but you do want it to turn and help out when the radiant skims into the middle of your fleet. Imagine if the radiant jumped into your fleet to kill a ship and the whole fleet turned to run away leaving your ships to die because they were set to not engage capitals... That would be worse than the suicidal wolf IMO.
There's certainly plenty of room to tune the AI and improve performance in particular scenarios, but I don't think the player setting specific behaviors before the battle would help. The AI needs to make those decisions freely in combat.
If controls are deemed excessive then have them inside a pop-up in the officer slot while in the refit screen or something. There's never a malus in adding more customization if it's done tastefully and with appropriate explanation of what everything does.
Adding more choices can absolutely make a game worse by making the game more difficult to learn, analyze, and balance. Outfitting is already the most complicated part of the game, and I don't think it needs more complexity.
Right - because of the 15% rule, +400 armor gives you +2666 HP
This is assuming you already had enough armor so that the weapon hitting you would be at the max damage reduction of 15%.
Heavy armor is actually better on ships with low armor who do not see the full damage reduction in many cases. If you already have high armor where most weapons are at the maximum damage reduction, then Heavy armor isn't that good. It's a bit counterintuitive tbh. That being said, I still agree that it's not enough of an effective HP increase to justify the maneuverability penalty.
Also, reapers die to vulcans and flak, so I would love if the AI would fire them at me while I wasn't overloaded. That might be a significant advantage for shieldless ships if the AI actually behaved like that