Three Formation Questions

As for the formations, I typically use wall to keep the task force together thus ensuring the have maximum weapons coverage... although I'm no expert.

As for changing the groupings in tactical battle, just drag a box over the ships and right click on where you send them like in a normal RTS game. If you mean doing this in a more "sophisticated" way like issuing a command from the menu or reassigning task forces within the battle itself, I have no idea.

I use wall and artillery for most of my fighting TFs. Those that are to run away get a mix of the rest, just for variety.

For fleet fromations I'll use anthing. I only ever have 2 to 4 TFs so it makes little difference. It might be interesting to split a fleet up into a lot of 3-ship elements. I'll try to remember and give that a shot sometime.

I have used the V formation a lot with troop transports in the #1 TF, at the back of the V (it's called something else, but it's just a big V).

It's been a while since I tried to give orders in tactical, so I can't help you much. I know that ships will ignore orders sometimes and follow the formation leader instead. You can fix this by taking them out of formation. I doubt that they'd be able to join up with another formation.

I hadn't noticed the discrepancy between formation pictures and the actual ship deployments. Now I'm a little curious.

Custom written formations that jam-pack all my ships much closer than the default ones do. 'Escort'/'Picket'/'Core' slots arranged to form a wall of "Meat Shields" (I have built ships with only 1 gun, some PD and everything else armour/shields for this role), Direct Fire front-line and Seeker artillery hiding behind it all.

Typically, all my ships are firing when a tiny fraction of the enemy's are shooting back (assume same ranged weapons on everything), depending on exactly which formation they use.

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.

On the incorrect formations issue.
I've seen it, and managed to reproduce it a few times.

It is directly related to what ships in a given TF were built first, and what order they're assigned to the fleet. [lit: which is higher up in a given trask-force listing]

It allso has something to do with Ship 01 of a fleet invalidating slot 01 in all groups for all other ships, regardless of what part of a task force it is.
EX: ships Alpha and Beta are in a fleet, Beta was actually built first, but Alpha is TF lead. Both ships try to take the same position in the TF.

EX-2: Ships Gamma, Epsilon, & Tau are in the same fleet, assigned as Gamma being Lead, Epsilon as core, and Tau as picket. No matter what the formation shows as, Tau will actually take the slot of picket 02. (this is some sort of numbering error based on when the ship was built [as in, it is built, and the computer assigns a unique id that only it sees. when put in a fleet, this Id is used for some reason to determine what slot they take, thus, the Formation gets borked when using more than 1 of the available types {being Core, escort, and picket}])

Thus, with 4 ships, as TF lead, Core, Escort and Picket, the picket ship will end up using slot picket 03, unless Picket ship was built first.

Many apologies if this is confusing, even I can't fully understand why it occurs. It really shouldn't occur at all, but it does.
It's even in the Balance Mod V 1.10

As to what formations I use? I don't bother with Fleet formation, but most of my Task forces use the Bullet formation.
Only non-com, or specialist ship use anything else.
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I'll make one later.

I use Bullet and Artillery formations for my Task Forces. and Starburst for my Fleets.