The sim we did during the last shift was purposefully created with a few situations in mind to test how we did. There were no black holes or minefields to fall back on, and the stations couldn’t defend themselves. Also, I don’t think any ships had dedicated comms officers, which added a bit more strain on crews.
One if the biggest things we ran into was that fleets were losing interest in us before we could circle around to to return to the first of the group we achieved tango with. We used the tactics described by Nhaima at the beginning, but it failed quickly because of the number of enemy ships and bases we tried to handle.
I was ordering strafing runs with Viper frequently to keep the enemy fleets interested in us, but by the time we would get back to the first in the group (we initially had 4 enemy fleets), it was making a run for the base already. Not having much working space between the fleets and the base to begin with, they were able to overwhelm us fairly quickly.
Ultimately, when I knew that there was not much of a chance to defend the outer bases, I chose a base that seemed to have the largest buffer zone around it, and withdrew the fleet to start pushing enemies back from those bases.
I think Nhaima’s description of how to deal with one of those scenarios is quite accurate, but only in an ideal situation. When numbers, the environment of the sector, and time are all working against you, that’s when sacrifices have to be made. If I had it to do over again, I probably would have sacrificed some of those outer bases earlier on and concentrated on saving the bases more in the center of the map.