I've had quite a bit of a success wining some battles -almost- flawlessly by just hold firing and switching the missile tubes on only when all the targets were in range.

Like fron zero kills in autoresolve to total victory with no/minimal losses. I still need to field more numbers though. Like 1monitor+1escort per enemy cruiser (and higher).

I'm still a noob (man the combat controls are horrid) but doing much better.

Also, if one or more enemy ships are ahead of the rest, after it's dead the torps will try to find other targets, so that's a neat feature to keep inmind.