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Is there any way you can determine wether or not a fleet will engage only at night or during the day? Perhaps through choice of leader?

For example in my last PBEM I formed a IJN fleet of 4 modern CL's (Kuma class) and 4 of the best DD's. Commander had low aggression rating.

I hoped they would engage a British BB fleet at night and use their torpedoes to good effect before withdrawing before the big guns could do any harm. However despite being only 1-2 hexes apart prior to the turn my fleet only engaged during daytime at a range of 20000+ plus yards. Result every ship sunk whilst my 14cm ping pong balls bounced of his BB armour. The fleet did not withdraw despite having a 15 knot plus speed advantage over the british BB's....

Yet a few turns later a similar sized force caught a couple of BB's at night and sank one and damaged the other with torpedoes for no loss....

So is there anyway to influence the timing of a fleets strike?

I don't know how to do it with 100% accuracy .. but in general.

If your fleet is sitting still and the other fleet enters the hex from nearby there will be a night battle. If you both have patrol orders, then the battle may also continue into the day. If the entering fleet has retire orders then the battle will only be a night battle.

My problem is usually the opposite, I usually want to try to have a day battle ... especially early in the game when the larger ships have an experience advantage. But also in general, I'd rather have my dreadnoughts fight during the day as their range advantage comes into play. To try to improve the odds of having a day battle, I use the patrol order and try to be more than half my move from the hex in question. This works sometimes, but sometimes I still get a night battle, though often the battle will continue into the day.

So again if you want sustained night battle, use patrol order and start 1 hex away, if you want incidental night battle use retire order and distance then should not matter ( for the TF entering the battle hex ).

If we could do it over again, I would like to try reversing the order of day and night for WPO ( vis-a-vis WITP ) since more day battles should be the norm for WPO, but we have what we have .. and the patrol order seems to be the way to improve odds of having day battle.

It is easy, day turn is composed from two naval movement parts. First one is during night, second during day. So if fleets meet during night, you can expect night battle ... ofcourse depends if patrol or retirement is set up. And it is the reason, I think, why more night battles occur. It is easier compute where your TF will be after first movement phase than at second ...