Very good thoughts here in this thread, and it's something I've been thinking about as well actually. I think that, mechanically, there is a lot to love here about the combat (at least for me). The swarming behavior is something I do think is important for interceptors and hypersonic pods, but something I intend to get rid of for other ship types.
Professor Paul1290: I think that you raise a lot of good points about the lack of need to split your forces, and it's something that bothers the heck out of me as well at the moment. I've been spending a lot of time noodling on that, and I think I'm headed in the direction of something fruitful. Not quite ready to share yet, as it's too many fragmented thoughts to write out coherently. But something definitely must be done. This is, to me, analogous to the "ball of doom" problem in AI War.
Misery: I agree that having the focus be on just a single (or trio, or whatever) of enemy ships in the general case is dull. I think that it is actually a valid way to have combat work in some cases -- when attacked by assassins or the AFA, for instance, or when you are attacking an outpost to destroy it. But outside of those contexts, I think that probably this model needs to shift in the sense that your objectives are different.
Cyborg: I'm addressing you last on this, because I think you have the most divergent comments, and I think they are also right on the money. I had not thought of the players getting involved in battles between two third-party forces and doing things to interfere as desired. That's brilliant, and would be really fun. I'm not sure if that is feasible within our time schedule, but we'll see. There are other fundamental issues that you mentioned, and I also could not agree more.
Teal: Actually asteroids and similar are already a part of battles!
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When you get right down to it, I think that these all have to do mainly with the makeup of the objectives and the battlefield. There are new "defense missions" that we are introducing hopefully later today that do require a different sort of behavior, and I think that those will be a nice bit of variety and actually addresses all of the concerns here in the context of that specific mode (swarming aside). THAT said, it's just one mode of combat, like constellations versus not, and the set of objectives in defense missions are too limited in order to be widely enjoyable if they were repeated too often. Kind of like the "empty space" ship battles with assassins and the AFA. Those are actually fine, just in extreme moderation.
So, to me, what this really boils down to is trying to think up lots and lots of different kinds of objectives and scenarios, where when you enter a battlefield you have different things to focus on rather than always just "kill that thing over there," and there are a variety of ways to go about it -- and most importantly, incentives to split up your forces in as many of those as possible. I don't want to homogenize things, though -- I think the existing modes are all good, it's just that some of them don't have enough legs to be done super frequently like they currently are.
I think we're all pretty much on the same page, and we all have different ideas on how to solve this. The thing is -- and this is what I love -- why choose one way? I think that choosing as many ways as can feasibly fit within our timeframe is actually the best course of action, because that way no one mode wears out its welcome. I adore the constellations, personally, but I get that having those be too frequent in terms of battles would be extremely wearing. Etc.