Combat improvements needed:
1) Some sort of "initiative/impulse" system to prevent the huge imbalances of "I go You go" combat. This could also be used to give smaller ships some advantages in combat so they are actually worth building in the late game.
2) Seperate settings for automated movement/fire-control so you can use partial automation and still control one aspect or another of your fleet manually.
3) Much more flexible fleet/formation/squadron controls. Either have definable 'squadrons' with seperately definable orders as others have mentioned, or expand formations to be vastly more flexible with some sort of 'script' language. More basic strategies are needed as well, of course. Also, some sort of 'macro' storage would be useful. If you want your 20 missile ships to move closer to a planet, fire, and move away in a single turn you have to manually click on 20 ships and repeat this
20 times! It would be so much easier to click a "define macro" button and 'teach' the ship its macro, then click it and touch a hot-key after that.
4) Speaking of individual ship controls, the control panel is inadequate. If you have a planet with dozens of WPs, or satellite group of 20 or 30 sats, you can have 100+ weapons to control on a single panel. What if you want to fire only a few of them at several targets? You have to click ALL of them off by hand! Argh!
Why can't there be a single "global toggle" button that flips all weapons to 'selected' or 'not-selected'??? You could turn them all off with one click and then re-select only what you need. And there also ought to be a display of your multiplex ability and how many targets this ship/unit stack has fired on so far this combat round.
[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 15 October 2001).]