I had never used formation before yesterday, and I noticed two things about it.
1 If a ship formations itself, it will not move. It will just spin. Furthermore, ships tasked in formation with this ship will also spin. Not sure if this is a valid suggestion, but keeping the spinning could be really good, but make the other ships tasked to it in the formation order circle around it. Like a record, rather than a # of independent spinning tops. Also, if you task a ship in the rear row to be the leader of the formation, nothing moves.
2 Formation should be called tugboat…??? I attempted to create a straight line formation. What occurred was that the ‘ship tasked to lead the formation’ (STTLTF) pulled ahead and then dragged the other ships slightly out of formation. I found several ways around this, but it is not formation. I don’t know how hard this would be to fix, but if it does, two things that should be fixed are:
(1) How formations pivot. The STTLTF should stop and other ships should rotate around it.
(2) Ships should actually stay in formation. That one ship taking point completely destroyed my fleet.