You can order them to move during a fight if you wish, and I often do to gain a certain advantage. For example, I move my Kol in close to maximize his near 360 degrees of firing (and he can take a beating) or I will queue up a flanking manuover with my fast lights to get in behind and take out his carriers. Fighters will continue to move about but large ships will not do unless they need to get in range or rotate to bring their best weapons to bear or you give them the order to move while fighting. Its just too frustrating for them to do unneccessary movement without your explicit orders regardless of how good you may think it will look, which I would also disagree with because it tends to create a chaotic mess. When we tried it we always just ended up hitting 'hold position'. Even Homeworld doesn't have its large ships move around without your orders during combat, only the small fighters and corvettes (of which the second class we don't have).

Finally, I really don't think Sins is short on strategy or tactics - I actually believe there maybe too much and it might be scaring people away. I hope that isn't the case because I am very interested in adding more in future releases.

1. Sins has firing while moving, from multiple banks at multiple targets.
2. Sins does have Z-movement, automatic use of it and user controlled use of it. Argue all you want on the tactical usefulness of user controlled z-movement but it is there and regardless its tactical usefulness its quite useful for formations and pathfinding.
3. Sins ships will move when they need to get in range or rotate to bring better weapons to bear.
4. Sins ships do not have to stop to shoot. They will fire from any weapon in any bank at any time if there is a ship in a valid firing solution (unless ofcourse you have autoattack off or your weapons are somehow disabled).
5. And this is the one that really confuses me since it keeps coming up. Homeworld's ships in combat behave effectively identical to those in Sins. Just to make sure I wasn't crazy, I loaded up a few of save games from HW2 (and believe me we know how they behave in HW:Cataclysm) and fought a couple battles making sure I had ships of the Fighter, Corvette, Frigate and Capital Classes. The homeworld fighters behaved just like Sins fighters in that they both borrow the Star Wars model of dogfighting and constant movement. We don't have corvettes, so hard to match up there. Sins does have Frigates and Capitals and they both behaved the exact same way they do in Homeworld in that they only move in combat to get in range or rotate.

Regardless of HW, Star Wars or any other game we made the choice that was best for this game and we think the battles look pretty damn amazing. Speaking of which I came across this again today, it's kind of an older video with obsolete graphics but still pretty cool: http://youtube.com/watch?v=KQ9yWrFzk9w.

Ships don't have to stop and shoot though they may have in one of the early betas.

This should be fixed. If the target is running away a ship won't stop to shoot.