Whereas regular combat in VGA Planets resolves conflicts between multiple ships in repeated 1:1 matchups, there are add-ons which allow real fleet battles. In those, many ships fight at once, allowing for a variety of new tactics, more realism and usually more watching fun.

Fleet Combat systems:

This is a testing version.
It may be incomplete, and have more bugs (or features) than the public live version at planetscentral.com.