i can only assume from reading this that your playing as the empire, good general tactics would be as follows... 1)as soon as the battle start pause it(if your playing against the comp, multiplayer youll just have to work faster at this point) and forget about the hammer anvil whatever bullshit 2)set your tie fighters to kill the rebel fighters 3)also set several small support ships to kill fighters as well, rebel fighters in any quantity, especially early in the game when you only have basic ties, will burn right through imperial fighters pretty quickly. cracken light cruisers work good for this earlier in the game, which is good cause theyre pretty worthless for anything else. 4)set all your remaining large ships to attack the large enemy ship you feel to be the biggest threat, i.e. the one that potentially will do the most damage to your fleet. 5)unpause(or in the case of multiplayer it wouldnt be paused at this point) and click on the targeted enemy ship, when its weapons are no longer functional, move on the the next most powerful enemy ship. 6)when all the enemy fighters have been cleared, assign you remaining fighters and smaller ships to kill the same ship the rest of your fleet is working on 7)continue to move from ship to ship in this manner till the enemy fleet begins to turn and run, or in the case of multiplay opponents too stupid to run(there are a few even when they have no ships capable of fireing at you ) until they have no ships capable of doing damage 8)as the enemy fleet attempts to flee pick out the largest most valuably ship, the one that tkaes the longest and most resources for your oppenant to build and attack with your fleet. a good portion of your oppents fleet may escape, but ussually youll kill at least that expensive ship and severly damge many of the others, while hopefully minimizing the damage to yours by nuetralizing you opponents weapons.