[oleg]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
Breaking formation is nearly always a much better idea than staying in formation. Non-combat ships always break formation anyways (not sure if you can change that...). Keeping your ships in formation guarantees that you will run into situations in which some ships move to positions to stay in formation where they can no longer fire on the enemy. That is a very bad thing to do.

Absolutely true. The only situation when keeping ships in formation may be benefitial is when enemy likes missiles. Then you must either put extra PDC on every ships or make sure ships stay close and cover each other.