Focus

The principle of concentrated fire has been around for a long time, possibly ever since people starting throwing rocks, and to my understanding, generally been considered a necessary tactical consideration.  I taught it to my kids during squirt gun fights.  Then I taught them that a garden hose beats squirt guns.  ;)  They taught those lessons to their friends in turn.  I can't see needing a technological advance to enable something like that.

I understand the desire for a variety of sorts in the battle viewer, but it is hard for me to see it as appropriate for what is essentially squad size fleets and therefore use squad tactics as opposed to big front lines all shooting at each other.

I assume that focussing fire on one ship after the other comes not from actual tactics, but from the way battles are internally solved by the code. If I would be the commander of a fleet with a damaged ship I would hold that in the background as much as possible, also since the ships are moving around each other a lot it would not be possible to always focus fire on a single enemy ship (we can assume that battle computers can calculate how a cannon must fire to hit another ship, but if that ship is outside the firing arc of a weapon that doesn't help and so this weapon would look for another target). Since all that cannot be seen in the battle viewer I strongly suspect there is no finely grained tactics in the battle code ...

Edit: btw, in my games I myself play the commander in that sometimes I take a damaged ship temporarily out of the fleet before the next encounter to avoid the situation that the battle code destroys the most damaged ship of my fleet first.

I do the same thing sometimes. If I was a fleet commander, and your flagship was behind your cruisers with a range of 25-72 miles on my guns I would shoot over your cruisers to hit your carrier, especially consider that you have about 45 f19s escorting 15 f14 tomcats would be more dangerous than a cruiser.