I keep reading all the angry rants about the AI and realize often the issue is that the game has zero control over formation.
Seriously just look at most battles, the result is ships making a weird ball and slowly slugging out until someone go nuts and break formation, then that someone gets murdered, or murder someone unexpectedly, or the usual: turns the formation instead into some "stringy" stretched thing, as sevreal ships pick 1 target on both sides, and the battlefield looks now like when you place your hand on slime and slowly raises it and there are those sticky strings between your hand the the beggining point.
So instead there should be a way to burn command points by making some formation.
1. I would love if in some fleets I could tag some ships to stay "inside" and others to make a circle or square around it (for example to protect a carrier or a station).
2. Sometimes your fleet has heavy firepower in one direction, for example when all your ships have frontal shields, or when playing mods that introduce broadside ships, so being able to make a 1600s style battle line would be great.
3. To counter battle line, similarly great would be able to setup wedges, for example I bet 3 onslaughts using their burn drive in a wedge formation probably would managed to split a battle line formation in half and then focus fire in whoever is closer to them and slowly kill everyone.
Just these would help a lot. A ton more formations are possible though.