This is actually kind of a rough subject. The 'Downward Spiral', or so it's called in video games, is as a general rule not the most fun thing to experience. It is an example of where folks give up realistic gaming for the sake of having more fun; fighting into an endless I keep doing worse and worse funnel of destruction isn't nearly as neat as both competitors slugging away at full steam for the duration of their lives.
The `downward spiral' or 'slippery slope' is exactly how RTS games generally work though. Lose that first colony, or first decent battle, then you're at an economic or military disadvantage, and assuming the enemy knows what they're doing they leverage that and your defeat is inevitable. Having this kind of behaviour in ship combat too doesn't sound like it would really change the nature of the game.
DancingWind suggests that performance degradation due to damage would make spreading fire across a fleet a viable tactic. I think it's actually a bit more complex - instead of focus firing on priority targets until they explode, one would instead focus fire on priority targets until the were damaged enough not to qualify as priority targets any more, due to their degraded combat effectiveness. So still focus fire, just a lot of half dead burning ships floating around being useless in the middle of a battle. I think this might be a pretty cool mechanic: if you're attacking a fleet, do you concentrate on completely destroying ships (at the cost of wasting firepower on effectively worthless targets) or concentrate on reducing the enemy fleet's net dps output by only shooting ships until they are ineffective, which could risk the enemy being able to repair their entire fleet back up to full strength with no casualties if they are able to force you into a retreat.
One idea that might promote spreading fire across an enemy's forces would be some kind of 'suppressing fire' mechanic. The basic idea: ships that aren't being shot at have all the time in the world to carefully aim their shots, while ships that are attempting to weave through a wall of fire are going to be a bit more rushed about aiming and consequently have somewhat reduced dps. Say if a frigate was experiencing X damage per second or more, it would count as being in a suppressed state, and its damage output would be reduced to some fraction of its normal unsuppressed output. Damage reduction due to supression could be coupled with shield mitigation, for example.
With some kind of mechanic like this, appropriately tweaked, the optimal strategy might be to keep all of the enemy's high dps output ships under supression fire, while focus firing on one of them with the remaining ships not needed for supression duty.
thoughts?
