Yeah, the fleet combat is utter garbage. Even fixing fighters and nerfing corvettes is just patch-work, ultimately. Combat's literally just "right click once, wait for it to resolve". That shit works okay when it's just masses of pre-industrial infantry, but it's fucking infuriating with spacecraft. It's like Paradox looked at how other 4Xes handled stuff and said "Lol, let's do it like EU" instead. They copied the superficial aspects in that they have the rock-paper-scissors weapon and defense setup (thankfully with more than three options total *cough*GalCiv*cough*), but didn't actually understand why those distinctions exist.
There's no point giving ships missiles if they're going to blindly charge into knife range with everything else. There's no point using anything except the most broken weapons (Torps vs. anything without point defense, those high-DPS autocannons against everything else) when there's no nuance and no ability to kite or maintain range. There's no reason to have variable sublight speed if everything boils down to a head-to-head brawl. The combat is dull, lifeless, and shallow. Normally in 4Xes I live for the moments where I get to carefully fight my fleets and win through skill and careful composition design, but not here. It's like less complex Civ 3 combat, and that takes some doing.
That's my main criticism. Everything else can be tweaked and fixed pretty easily, but combat is utterly and comprehensively shit at the most basic level. It's as bad as GalCiv combat, and that's literally higher number wins with a grand total of three weapons and three defenses, because at least GalCiv pauses the greater galaxy or lets you autoresolve.
I mean god damn, it's not like they didn't have SoaSE to copy the combat from, because damn near everything else feels like a pretty close replica of that with the Paradox spin on things. And hey, there's another thing they missed out on, specialty capital ships and active abilities for ships based on class and modules.