Seriously outnumbered is more or less a given when deploying battleships. The only fights that really matter are those 300,000+ credit bounty fleets which are always huge, or Remnant Ordo or Sub-Ordo fleets. Anything else falls into the category of "I have absolute dominance" and no matter how bad the tactical AI fails, there's no threat. No number of combat freighters is going to take down a Death Star (as I like to refer to Paragons and Radiants). But it doesn't seem like just being outnumbered 3-1 or 4-1 should rattle a group of Steady officers, especially since, if they stay together, they'll be popping those enemy destroyers like pinatas.
Escorts aren't sticky enough, is a big part of the problem. An escort will dart off to engage an enemy that poses no real threat, but by breaking formation that escort will suddenly be in the midst of a dozen enemy ships. All my pilots have elite Shield Modulation, all my ships have Hardened Shields S-mods, and maximum flux capacitor loadouts, but 10,000-15,000 flux goes fill up real fast, even at 0.4/dam, when the AI does something so stunningly stupid as to break free of the sheltering PD storm the battleships can throw up, and rush a dozen smaller ships.
And I do try to mae use of that free command window, but the problem there is that I find that command persistence is about exactly as long as the command window. So I'll give a series of Defend commands all at once, and ten seconds later I've got three ships drunkenly pirouetting around each other and drifting away from their assigned nav points...until a single enemy scouting frigate or gunship shows up, at which point they ignore orders and rush over to the tiny ship that they can't catch, breaking up the formation and knocking over the first domino in a series of infuriating AI failures that leads to heavy losses or total battle failure.
There needs to be a "stop thinking for yourself and hold the line, ye scurvy dogs" option. At some point, placement matters more than individual capability. You'd think that even in the future, people would know that in combat you die alone but succeed as a team.
edit to TontonBoo: If you're not ragequitting, you're playing less wrong than I am
I can't find that balance of strategy-level commands that keeps the fleet together, is the ultimate point of failure. And once my fleet is split up - especially once combat has gone on a minute or so and I'm out of command points and can't do anything about half my fleet chasing a single friggin' gunship while the other half - invariably the Astral and Onslaught - gets pounded by what should have been a manageable OpFor, all I can do is stare at my screen and stew in my hatred for this AI