As we’ve been running so long, it is interesting to see this come up… its not thr first time. Its a shame because we did work out a really effective system with some brilliant comms officers. Wolfe Silver was an officer who I worked with to sort all this coordinate. In the past we’ve experimented with teams of comms officers working together to a single designated comms officer sorting all ships.
I would love to get back to doing this again as we really got it pinned down in the past. The best way was having a full crew of six on the flag ship and having the comms officer dedicated to organising the NPCs. The key is making sure other comms officers don’t interact with NPCs as that can really derail plans. Of course, it means the flag ship needs a full crew for it to work.
In terms of using NPC ships too, there are plenty of strategies which I’d be happy to go through e.g. use grouped combat vessels, fine manourving and positioning of ships (including how to get them to hold position), protecting non-combat allies, selecting targets for combat allies (i.e. not getting them wiped out).