It would be nice if there was a better way to direct my fleets in Sins that didn't involve a lot of frantic clicking and micromanagement.  There are a few actions I wish for regularly that would eliminate the common micromanagement that I find myself doing:

• Add a command to attack all ships of a given type.  The ship given this order would acquire a target of the given type in the gravity well, attack it until it was destroyed or left the gravity well, and then repeat the task until all the ships of that type had been either killed or driven away.  This would be really useful when I want to tell my fleet to target the repair ships first, for instance.
• Add a command to guard a ship, which means that the ship should follow its target in some way and attack ships that attack it.
• Add a command to guard all the ships of a given type, which means that the ship should treat ships in its current gravity well that attack a ship of the target type.
• In combination with the above, add a new button in the Tactics pane to enable or disable focus firing.  With focus firing enabled, commands that target multiple ships (like the ones I mentioned above) will cause all the ships in the group to attack the same ship; otherwise they'll attack ships at their discretion.

Some more out-there ideas:

I'd also like the ability to define subgroups within a fleet that would be separated in the empire tree, maybe with a way to cycle through the subgroups with a keystroke, and the ability to assign ships to a fleet at the time I put them into the build queue rather than having to fiddle with rally points (they should automatically jump to where the fleet is and join in whatever it's doing).  In fact, I'd like to be able to set some general rules for a fleet's composition (X number of flaks, Y percent of carriers) and just hit a "spend some money on ships please!" button to beef it up from the nearest shipyard.  See, e.g., the auto-upgrades that ships get in the latest GalCiv.

And on my wish-list of features that would be cool but probably too much effort for the developers: I'd like to be able to issue "standing orders" to a fleet.  I don't have a clear idea of what these would be, but they'd basically be scripts that I could tell a ship to follow, with rules like "when the health of <target> drops below <value>, do <action>" and "if there are more than 10 repair vessels, attack them first; otherwise attack carriers."  Since I'm dreaming, I should be able to assign a separate script to each sub-group of the fleet with one click (presumably by assigning well-known names to the subgroups), and I'd like to be able to create scripts from the main menu and save them for future games (like the GalCiv ship creator).

Ok, I'm done.