While the combat system is promised to be reworked, there still will not be direct player control during the battle (aka no RTS feature). Instead you will be able to layout certain conditions and commands and see if they work out. Similar to Gratuitous Space Battles. So there may be an options that allow you to protect key ships and if certain ships sustain too much damage, they have orders to pull back.

I'd be happy if they made a mini-Football Manager system for battles: You pick the ships you want to do the attacking, which if your ships attacks which one of the enemy ships, how those attacks occur (tell your ships not to waste time firing their missiles/only fire missiles at frigates/whatever), rules for withdraw/protect based on the situation (outnumbered, damaged etc). Then press Play and cross fingers....

Which sounds like what Ryat's suggesting. So, sweet.

I guess there's a spectrum between too much randomness and too much fiddling around with battles. Just a question for the devs of where on the spectrum they want the game to be.