I can't help but agree that some level of out-of-battle pre-setting of orders could be helpful. At the moment, there's a lot of repetition of effort, setting the same ships to the same orders each battle. Furthermore, later, when you're up against more serious foes, I've personally found I have to stop flying my own ship and concentrate upon the battlemap - otherwise ships are far more likely to get themselves destroyed if I'm not watching every part of the map.
A Tactics tab would be nice, even if it just has a few checkboxes and dropdowns, such as, 'Hull Damage Retreat Level,' 'Start Flagship in Autopilot' (since I often don't get to fly it later on anyway and see little point in handling the first 30 seconds of manuevering in any case.) You could allow it to give more control over Fighter wings, such as controlling their retreat/resupply levels and whether or not to resupply or retreat after expending strike weapons (ie when you've attacked a small group of light frigates and don't want your torpedo bombers gobbling up all your supplies never hitting anything,) though that last one could easily be a toggle in the battle map (though ideally there would be both,) "Resupply Strike Weapons [ ]" with a light in the box when resupply is active (which it would be by default.) Heck, being able to set a retreat time for frigates would be handy too, so as to better husband their upcoming diminishing Combat Readiness (and have them give warning at the top of the screen as well, so you know they're about to pull out and allow manual cancellation of that order in combat for those exceptional times when you can't spare their guns, burned out engine coils or no.)
If the tactics tab could let you set default orders for each ship (so it could have a smaller ship selection box like the fleet tab on the bottom left and the same command buttons as on the battle map on the bottom right) so you can set up that which you will every map in any case, ie the HMS.Noclosedefense which will always need an escort, gets one every time. Perhaps a default "Waypoint Alpha" could be generated just in front of each fleet's starting spot (perhaps, since we're losing battle objectives in the next patch, it would be prudent to give us default waypoints anyway) so your Carriers and Civilian ships will always hang back to pelt the enemy with LRM's and wont throw in unless you manually rescind the order.
This would not be necessary addition to the game, it would just be nice. Very nice. Like vastly reducing boring busywork and letting you enjoy the game more nice. When I'm staring at the icons on the battlemap because I can't count on my ship captains and wing commanders, all of those pretty graphics are pointless. z: j
