Large fleets don't seem to keep formation

[WWII44]

Some thing that has always been a bother is that when I have massive fleets they don't keep formations and the division leaders are far out in front when the enemy is engaged and the rest are bunched up in a disorganized blob miles behind. It's worth noting that this seems to happen when running the time compression up to the point the first enemy is spotted but I never used normal time up to first contact so I do not not know if this is exclusively related to time compression.

[Nitemares]

yea... There is a few things to keep in mind, and some observations I have as well.

The first is the game tries to organize your ships into divisions based on the speed of your ships, and class. So DDs get grouped together, CLs together and so.

While the ships in the division can (usually) keep up to each other (as long as undamaged, and have fuel). The divisions them selves don't stay together... This is a blessing and a curse.
As a blessing, it allows you to use you faster divisions to actually find the enemy, or to get around to the flanks to establish a crossfire.
As a Curse, it usually means 1 or 2 divisions find the enemy quickly while the rest of your fleet is combat ineffective (to long a range to hit them)....

6 of one, half dozen of the other. As there are upsides and downsides to both.

However, I have noticed that the more ships in a battle, the more likely that things break...
"helicopter ships" and "rocket ships" seems to happen more often when the number of ships exceeds 60 or so. I have also noticed things like ships with an Accuracy of 80% suddenly can't land a single shot, ships not responding to player inputs, ships that refuse to sail in some directions, and other REALLY ANNOYING errors become more common with larger fleet engagements.

I with we had a slider to control the number of ships that can get into a battle, to test this a bit more.... but yea..

[Wyrm]

At the start of all larger battles, my ships start banging together since they weave back and forth within the formation. Makes for a horrid mess

[NT_Dave]

The battle formations are totally screwed up. The captains are all drunk, especially those in the battleship columns. Screening squadrons are not kept in a coherent group and as was pointed out are scattered across the entire fleet. Ships of different maximum speeds are often mixed together. Sometimes I have had to spend a half hour or more trying to reorganize a bit better before starting movement, but this just adds to the "drunk captain" issues.

But keep the faith, folks. We're about to get elections added to the mix. And I'm very (not) impressed with the new changing flags (yawn).

Plus, once again, I stray from the topic a bit and say "NO DEEP WATER, OPEN OCEAN MINEFIELDS! ITS BS!

[Hidden Gunman]

At times, neither can two or three ships.

[Sterling Archer]

It appears something happened in one of the recent patches. Ships used to follow at a reasonable distance from each other. Now even with just a few ships the spacing soon becomes 2k or more between them.

[munroburton]

Drop some anchors! Set your fleet's speed to 5 knots at the start, 0 for screens/scouts. Whatever division you want to lead gets 10 knots. Once it's in front, speed up the next division and so forth to get your line of battle.

Keep the speed at or below cruising speed(NOT that notch on the speed slider, you have to hover over a selected ship's max speed to see the real cruising speed) until the line is stable.