1. The graphics should follow the logic of how the ships choose to fight.

2.  The logic of how the ships choose to fight should flow from how they are armed:

1. Ships armed with missiles should attempt to stay within the range of their missiles, but out of range of beams and kinetics
2. Ships armed with beams should try to stay within range of their beam weapons, but out of range of kinetics
3. Ships armed with kinetics should try to stay within range of their kinetic weapons
4. Ships armed with multiple types of weapons should follow the logic for the weapon they have the most of

It drives me nuts to watch a battle replay and watch my ships armed with kinetic weapons, which can fire on every phase, blow past the enemy ship and go out of range for a few phases.

It also drives me nuts to watch my ships armed with missiles fire their missiles when they get into range and then blithely keep sailing toward the enemy and into the range of the enemy's beam and kinetic weapons while my missile weapons have to wait 12 phases before they can fire again.

Ship captains should not be stupid!

P.S.  I do like the improvement where not all ships go after the same enemy ship. It saves a lot of wasted shots.

I get this frustration, but I don't know if it's something they can solve that would be worth the time and effort to create ship behaviors like what you're asking for.  

It also creates an issue in that the battlefield gets much wider and creates camera angle issues for anything except top down.

Starbase Orion has ship behaviors similar to what you're asking for, but they only have a top down view making the viewing of a battle with behaviors like "operate at max range of weapons" much simpler to show.  

Overall I would focus on things other than ship behaviors not because they don't make sense, but because I think the effort to make them work could be placed elsewhere and get more bang for your buck.  I have a couple thoughts on that that'll I'll add here as I find time

What you are saying reminds me of the Charge of the Light Brigade - it is OK to stupidly ride to your death as long as you look good doing it!    

Idea 1:

I know you're already working on this, but really focus on making ship classes distinct and useful.  Your ship battles can have cinematic level graphics,  but having the same ship copy pasted 30 times just makes them boring.  A fleet made up of at least 2 ship types is far more interesting than 1.  If you get 3 or more visually distinct ships on average though, that really sells it.  It gives the player a lot of interesting interactions to watch.

Example:

Fleet 1: Drengin

3 Fighters

1 Battleship

Fleet 2: Terran

2 Fighters

4 Bombers

1 Cruiser

Engagement:

1. The 4 Drengin fighters first engage the Terran fighters taking down both of them, but losing 1 in the process and heavy damage to another.

2.  The Drengin fighters then engage the bombers before they can deal damage to the Battleship.  They take down 2, but the Cruiser is able to destroy them before they can finish the last 2 bombers.

3.  The bombers are able to reduce the Battleships shields to zero as it takes the Cruiser apart.

4.  The Battleship takes shots at the bombers struggling to destroy them taking HP damage in the process.

5. The Battleship ultimately succeeds in destroying the bombers, but lost a lot of HP in the process.

This is a much more interesting battle than 3 cruisers vs 3 cruisers, but it requires working with the ship classes giving them strengths and weaknesses. In this example bombers would need to have a reduction to their weapons range, but an increase in weapon damage against larger ships such as battleship and dreadnought classes such that a few bombers are a real threat to larger ships.

It also creates more interesting tactical choices such as:

Had the Battleship had more fighter escorts then it wouldn't have suffered as much damage.

Had the Terran fielded more bombers or fighters they might have destroyed the battleship.

Quoting PaulLach, reply 3

What you are saying reminds me of the Charge of the Light Brigade - it is OK to stupidly ride to your death as long as you look good doing it!    

I'm just saying I don't know if this is something they could put together without major changes to the system. Ship behaviors sound good, but the logistics of coding them could be more difficult than it's worth.

Idea 2:

Fighters and bombers are supposed to be pretty small even compared to Frigates.  A really cool way of viewing a fighter would be to shrink its size and make it a three or four man squadron shown in the picture below.  These could be given slight animations that make them look like they're flying together.  As the group sustains damage you would have them blow up separately from one another although I wouldn't change damage stats.

I don't really know how feasible this is, but it would look cool and make fighters and bombers feel more like they're small strike groups and give the larger ships a more intimidating and immense feeling

Idea 3: 

I watched a review on Starship Troopers recently and the reviewer made the comment that the weapons don't feel punchy.

What he meant by that was they don't give the feeling that they're doing damage to the enemy insects.  Eventually the insect just drops dead after you shoot it enough, but there's no reaction to the bullets, or any visual indicator of damage.

You could add some punchyness (That's now a word) by providing visual cues when the weapons strike their targets.

Missiles could produce small explosions, kinetics create small showers of sparks, and beams produce hot spots that glow for a second before fading.

When a weapon is stopped by a shield, the shield briefly glows before fading.

These all would just look cool and give a good feeling to the player watching the battle.

Idea 4:

Last idea for now.  I want to say that I think the GC4 battle viewer surpasses the GC3 battle viewer and if I remember right this isn't nearly as much of an issue.

Change up the starting positions of ships to be more visually cinematic.  You want them to look like a strike group.  

Here's and example if you had every type of ship in your fleet.

I would then change it so the largest ships in the fleet would always take the middle spot so as not to leave a huge gap.  You can even work with the 3D space you have to make it look even better.

Close up looks silly imo.

By sophisticated battle, I'm going to guess that you mean battles that make sense strategically.  Missile ships would try and stay at max range, kinetic and beam ships would chase them to try and get in range.

In real life missles are likely to be the most effective weapons fired thousands of miles away.  Obviously that's not very interesting spectacle.

That's why most movies and TV shows choose the WW2 route of get in close to deliver payloads.

I think you should go for the movie route overall as it's more entertaining.

I think there's still plenty of strategic options that can be added to combat, I did a breakdown on how I would handle weapon design in the Combat Discussion post recently.  I would recommend going for fun over realism and just provide player's satisfing ways to fight the battles.  Just because they're not realistic doesn't mean they can't have underlying sophistication that provides meaningful options for fleet construction to the player.

We actually could eventually see a return to WW2 style combat if missile defense systems became so good as to obsolete long range missiles.  Our missile technology has just outpaced defenses against it.  A system that could easily find and destroy large missiles would force us to make them smaller and faster which would reduce the fuel and range.  Or if you could reliably destroy their guidance systems.  Now they're unguided rockets rather than missiles.

https://youtu.be/iJb8sFDCdFM    вот каким примерно хотелось бы видеть бой в игре  

In a nutshell, here's what is missing in the game, and what kind of fight I would like to see.

Is there a way you can keep the distances and behaviours realistic while scaling the model and particle effect sizes to keep them punchy?

Some behaviour meaning that an isolated ship is liable to be picked off may help fights to stay broadly coherent on the macro scale: maybe small buffs for being within a certain range of each friendly ship, and small nerfs for large fleet sizes that cancel out if the fleet stays vaguely together to represent command and control integration.

You can only install a certain amount of weapons platforms on a ship because each weapon system (Kinetic, Beam, Missile) has different mass.

When I calculate the damage per second per unit of mass it seems like missile weapons are useless to use. Seems like you simply can't do a reasonable amount of damage at all with missiles and there is no point in even installing them onto your ships.

The AI ship behavior seems to also make the relevance of missiles useless. You can get at most one or two shots off when the enemy AI ships are outside kinetic and beam range and the missile damage is so low its a waste of space to put them on the ship. Missiles will not make a significant difference in who wins the battle.

The only idea I can think of is to adjust the missiles to do spherical radius damage. Not sure what to do about missiles. You could probably destroy the missiles with a kinetic or beam weapon before it even hits the ship. Its hard to figure out how to make missiles an effective space combat system.

You're forgetting to take one important feature of missiles into account.  They can engage enemy ships at distance prior to engaging in an actual fleet battle.  This can be used to significantly weaken an enemy fleet by repeating several times before actually engaging.  Beam weapons also have this ability, but at a significantly reduced range.  Currently Kinetic weapons cannot attack outside an engagement.

Perhaps your battle visualization could distort distances and the speed that time passes to make battles look (and feel) more interesting. I think that you wouldn't distort the distances within a fleet. But at long ranges, you would have the fleets look closer than they were, and you would speed up time by the same amount. For example, at missile range, you could reduce the displayed inter-fleet distance by 3x and make time go 3x faster. At beam range, you reduce the distortion, so the displayed inter-fleet distance is only shrunk by 2x and time is faster by 2x. Finally, at kinetic range, there is no distortion, and time runs at normal speed. (Of course, you probably want to smoothly transition between these regimes, not suddenly jump.)

This has some nice effects. At long range, when things are happening slowly, because missile reload times are so long, the action is sped up, to keep it interesting. At close range, when the fleets are practically in contact, and it is a melee, the action goes at normal speed. What you see is all the kinetic shots. The missile shots appear to have slowed down, but that it OK visually, because all the kinetic action is drawing the attention.

Also, by having the time speed-up equal the distance shrinkage, the rate that the fleets approach each other on the display is constant. For example, suppose the fleets are going a thousand miles per second, and one inch on the screen is 1 thousand miles when there is no distortion. Then when there is a 3x distortion, the fleet distance is 3 thousand miles per inch, but since time is sped up 3x, the fleets cover that distance in 1 second of display time. The fleets are always approaching at one inch per second of display time.

You could embrace the distortion in the display, by having a distance scale and a clock, so the user could see the distance scale change and see the clock slow down.