Lately I've been experimenting with evasion strategies other than the reflexive retreat whenever a ship's hull gets damaged past a certain point.  I like to play with huge maps, so retreating can be a logistic nightmare.  I should point out that this has only been done vs. the AI, but I can see that it might get a little troublesome for a person as well.

Anyway, my idea was this:  When a unit's hull drops to the point where I might consider a retreat, I assign that unit a particular set of waypoints that takes it essentially into an orbit around the planet.  Six to eight waypoints per revolution seems to be an acceptable resolution, but there's of course a tradeoff between the time it takes to issue the orders and the fidelity of the orbital path.  At early stages of the game, before a lot of strike craft show up, this works perfectly to keep the unit alive.  Frigates and cruisers in pursuit have to do all they can just to keep up, and firing becomes much harder for them.  The ship can orbit for a few revolutions and regenerate some shields and/or hull, and then join back with the main fleet to clean up anyone that might be left.

Now, strike craft would more or less negate this strategy, as they can keep up with anything without a problem.  Then again, you can place a lot of Flak frigates or Fighter squadrons into orbit to take care of anything like that.

Keep your carriers orbiting out here, with a generous complement of fighters and/or flak frigates set to engage within weapons range, and I bet you'd have some pretty interesting results.  I haven't done this, so don't sue me if not

Now, if only there were a way to put units into a proper orbit, and perhaps tell you how much time it's going to take for 1 revolution.  And maybe how much time each phase jump would take.  Then you could get really creative

[Not to mention having the actual planets orbit, and having the phase lanes generated dynamically according to real orbital mechanics ]