Can use the escort hotkey with no ship selected. Gives the escort popup, but can’t do anything other than delete.
Behaviour is very flakey - I’ve seen the following:
6,5,4,3,2 ships groups - ‘E’ - escort window up, red escort lines visible from all - click on mothership, interface bleep - lines all disappear. escort order is still blank (no target)
1 ship 5(?) grid squares away from mothership, same behaviour. move ship closer and it works
another experiment. ship 7 grids away - escort fails. move to 3 grids, it works. delete that order. move ship one grid away at a time, and retry (deleting the order each time)… it works out to 8 grids now.
3 ships - only one got an escort line. repeating with identical ships/target immediately after… no escort lines at all.
on the whole, the only way to set escort/formation seems to be individually - which isn’t good with 60 ships
(side note about deployment screen) -
selecting multiple ships on a slow system causes MASSIVE mouse-lag… truely horrendous. even selecting 3 ships makes the mouse hard to deal with.
selecting a cruiser with 3 weapon arcs doesn’t cause noticable lag, selecting 3 frigates with one arc each causes noticable slight lag. selecting 6 frigates… i’d say the mouse is down to single-figure fps