The ideal formation in 2D warfare like this, where ships cannot shoot through each other much, is a
line of battle, which is how real formations of real ships fought, and with good reason.
This means every is ship as physically close to one another as they can be, without quite being in AOE from the one weapon that might deal significant AOE on a single strike- the heavy torpedoes. After that, you want ships with a strong left-side / right-side to hold the flanks, forward-firing to hold the center. Unlike those ships of the 17th/18th/19th centuries, these spacecraft tend to have their heaviest firepower forward, so they don't need to stay perpendicular to the enemy in order to maximize their effective firepower.
After that, you're fine, and there is literally
no reason aside from Objectives to disperse more than that. It's ideal.
Any enemy that enters the range of the center piecemeal will die too quickly to trade much DPS, and will most likely be destroyed in detail without taking down any shields.
This is why players tend to do a whole lot of "grab everybody to guard my ship" stuff; it's the one command that gets closest to the ideal.
But it fares pretty poorly when multiple targets engage; I have frequently moved up on targets and suddenly I'm in the middle of enemies, because my erstwhile "team" has all decided to maneuver on their own, taking their own targets and maneuvering wildly, taking them far enough away from my ship that I no longer can expect support. IRL, they'd all get court-marshaled afterwards for disobeying orders, lol.
The AI also fares pretty poorly in terms of placement and flanks; if I'm in a Capship, I expect my Cruisers, Destroyers et al at my flanks and conform to my turns, not form in a loose blob behind me. Since they're faster than me, it
should work out, but the AI doesn't do that.
Same with the targeting command; it should select that target for all ships guarding you, so that you can all fry it
together, or the player can kill a lesser threat while your long-range snipers take down that cruiser that's approaching at 1500 su. But it's not working that way; the player is having to do the killing strikes.
Same with arranging a bombing run. The last thing you want is dispersion during the strike; ideally, all ships should be time-on-target and arrive within a second or two of each other, ideally from multiple angles, so that the target's AAA is unable to kill any bomber Wings. A formation command putting bombers in a wing, that they couldn't break until the center of the formation was < 500 SU of the target's collision circle would be ideal and would result in classic envelopment most of the time.
Same with strike runs by torpedo fighters. You want dispersion to maximize angles and for all strikes to arrive nearly simultaneously. There, maybe 1000 su would be ideal for most cases.
But the big issue is interceptors. They should hold formation and only split when one or more Wings are being engaged, then return to formation when they're not. This gives them enough concentration that they can expect to defeat any two Wings simultaneously without losing any Wings themselves (they'll lose members, of course, but that's just how that goes, and if they can be replaced in the future on the fly...).
Right now, the fighters do a great job of flanking and spreading out, but that's only useful when it's lots of fighters vs. a single large ship. It's just getting them defeated in detail when the enemy has flanks with AA. I've lost track of how many hundreds of fighters I've taken down simply by keeping my own fighters within my fleet's AA umbrella and letting the enemy get destroyed one Wing at a time as fast as they arrive, doing little or no damage.
Put 4 Wings of any Fighter together and force them to stay leashed until it's time to attack, and then attack the same target, though, and they're a massive threat, because then the concentration works the other way. 16 Talons can kill most things in the game in a couple of passes, if they aren't killed in detail. We're really going to see how this works when Fighters are more-or-less immortal so long as your carriers are up.
Concentrated firepower is vastly more important than fancy AI maneuvering. It's why Zerg Rush works in the first place. It's why putting Marines in Bunkers is cool. It's why people loved Peewee rushes.
The game is very much a RTS; it's just a RTS with very complicated characters. There are resources to spend, you can get more forces on the battlefield over time- all the RTS elements are there.
They're still trading DPS in a 2D world, though, and concentration matters. In a game where lots of the characters have self-healing hitpoints (shields) it's downright lethal; whoever gets through Shields or puts an opponent into Overload has the overwhelming advantage from then on.
That said, I don't know if there's a perfect answer for this and I'll defend the current status quo to some extent (not least because some of it is stuff I suggested, lol).
From an issue of gameplay, the way it works now makes the player more of a
hero, and with the new hero buffs and the fact that a lot of players put themselves in their biggest ship, it's probably OK for the rest of the stuff to be blobby and not terribly tactical.
I like that the player-as-hero works really well. I like that a lot; I think it provides a nice way to split experience levels and I only wish that the C&C tree was as rich and vital as Tac and Tech are.
But I would love it if having rigid control was possible, for the cold-blooded, tactical-warfare people who are willing to do math and build a fleet that meets their exact requirements. I think it'd be awesome if, someday, we had a way to trade Fleets with one another and could pit our Fleets against each other, with AI control but player direction as to formations and initial objectives.
It would give players lots to experiment with; it would give mods all sorts of options, and it would feel dramatically right, to see two huge lines of warships meet in a sea of electronic death.
Right now, we can't even mod up a reasonable simulation of WWI ship-to-ship combat, though. Let alone the lines of battle that were the classic naval strategies of the period before that, or the more modern, ring-shaped formations that are used to conduct ASW and AA duties for a modern task force,
centered on a carrier and its tenders.
Note how close they are keeping station there- that is all that is necessary IRL, and it keeps all the firepower of all those assets where they need to be, concentrated, unless one or more frigates needs to respond to ASW threats after interrogation by other assets. They only disperse a
lot more than that if they are worried about nukes.