In a more realistic space battle scenario weapons would have to be able to miss. You would pick your engagement range based on it. It's kind of like sword fight

In a more realistic space battle scenario weapons would have to be able to miss. You would pick your engagement range based on it. It's kind of like sword fighting in that sense: you want to be close to the enemy, but far away enough that you can react to their attacks. The only reason that it wouldn't work this way would be if you had some incredible shields/armor/defensive measure of some kind that would protect you. The future would likely include lasers as some kind of a weapon, which indicates to me that engagement ranges would be so massive that even light will have a significant amount of travel time.