Ships set to Area Defence will shoot at any hostile missiles within range.

Ships set to Final Defensive Fire will attempt to protect any ships within their engagement range that are about to be hit.

Steve

And while we are on the subject of formations... what do the "Superior Formation" selection actually do. I can see a list of them in the box of the parent. But what do I use that for, I guess it has to do with giving order to subordinate forces... or?

Final fire targets at a minimum anything directed at the task group.  I believe it targets everything targeted at the same location but i'm not sure.

Yes, I'm pretty sure that my beam weapons might not do as much defensive fire overall with this tactic. I rather figured those weapons were more a small bonus anyway. I rather want to try the defence in depth tactic which also increase my sensor coverage overall, not just against missiles but fighters and against enemy beam ships that may try to rush my formation. I'm not just worried about missiles.

Although, no one answered my question about final fire. Is it only ships in the same Task Group that will fire or everyone with beam weapons within range of the target, this can be somewhat important to know?

Well, there's not much wrong with the formation as devised, except that its pretty much unnecessary to spread out like that - you can set up 'dynamic' formations using facings and offsets pretty readily which automatically adjust to the direction of enemy ships.  The main problem is that beam area defense against missiles is almost wholly impractical - you're almost always better off in a final-defensive-fire empire state formation.  IMO, only planetary fire controls can get enough to hits at reasonable range to conduct effective area defense.

Putting AMM escorts in interdiction position works, as long as your AMMs are significantly faster than the incoming missiles. But it's only actually even useful if your problem is volume of incoming missile salvos instead of your AMM magazines.  

The kick in the knickers is that often the escorts will get targeted by incoming fire and you just don't have any depth of defensive capability to protect them.  "Empire state" formations solve these problems without any real weaknesses.

I really don't know exactly what you mean about it being impractical. It is fully automated and the ships will take this formation once I have found a threat and I do extend my missile tracking ability quite extensively so I can fire more at incoming ordnance. The picket will also change once a threat vector has been detected so they can engage it with their full diameter (not radius) with defensive fire, should provide some more intensive fire than just relying on final fire from one core group. I have not tested this in battle yet, but I hope to do so soon.  

Though, being technologically inferior I really feel that detecting the missiles early on is even more important. If they shoot at the escort that is more a bonus than not, that means less heat at my core mission ships and the escorts is faster and will be able to withdraw or manoeuvre between salvoes if they survive. The escorts are designed to be very defensive.
Shouldn't it also be less probable that the escorts is targeted since they are a smaller target, more difficult to get a lock on them than versus a large CV or Battle Cruiser that is only a couple of million km further out?

The second reason for the formation is to protect against enemy beam ships, I really don't want them to come near my core mission ships, better that they target my escorts first. They also can fire back with their beam weapons to some extent.

Your area defense looks to be protecting only one ship.

What I'd do, is take your formation, and instead of single ships put squadrons there. Then I'd count it as a good formation.

I have been tinkering around with the formation controls of Task Groups in the game and I really find these super fun.

I have now devised a plan for how I will protect my larger battle groups and how I will perform different actions. In the picture below you could see one of my large battle groups deployed in an offensive formation.

http://firedragon.mine.nu/Aurora/Tactical_Pictures/CV_formation.jpg

The blue lines are missile sensors, the red lines are missile tracking systems and the yellow lines are laser area-defence weapons.

The Frigates would mainly be armed with CIWS, Gauss cannons and Light laser batteries (10-12cm). They would also sport decent spotting sensors for missiles.

The cruisers would be armed mainly with AMM but also with some medium size ASM capability.

The core ships could be any type of mission ships, in this instance to large CV.

Groups could obviously have fewer or more ships, this would depend on the situation and resources available.

My main though here would be to early detect any incoming missiles/fighters or beam heavy enemy ships. Once the threat has been identified my fast moving Frigates will fan out in that direction and extend my detection range and engage the threat with their area defence lasers and gauss cannons.

One question, will ship fire final defence fire even if they are not in the same TG at the moment but within range of the ship being targeted by missiles?
My guess is that they can't... any way I don't think this would matter that much though in the end for this tactic to work.

So, would this work or not?