…I’ve been making a few ship layouts for cruisers and my ships will charge in then just stop dead in the water. Other cruisers don’t seem to have a problem so what gives?
Specifics…
Imperial Legion Cruiser Hull
3x Fast Recharge Shields
5x Cruiser Laser
1x Cruiser Beam Laser
4x Supercharged Engine
2x Power Generator III
1x Crew Module III
1x Powered Armour
So why would my ships stop dead in the water? Is there some fuel component or something that’s not displayed?
have you added “Keep moving” order? because without it ships just fly into attack range and shoot. What else do you expect? 
Make the engagement range shorter
This. Just remember that many weapons have a not-insignificant minimum range.
Nah see I thought of all that…they don’t have keep moving or formation or any of that. They have engage orders for cruisers/frigates at 300 range because of the small cruiser laser range.
They just fly and…stop. Maybe because they have the one beam weapon they’re getting confused?
Try the ship - make it and put like 10 in a straight line and put a tank ship in front…seems to happen all the time 
Where exactly are they stopping? What range from the enemy? Are they “stuck” behind friendly ships?
It seems they’re stopping at around 80-8500…which is where the single beam laser can sometimes fire but none of their cruiser lasers. They have retaliate, cooperative, and attack frigate/cruiser both set to 300.
triple check that those invididual cruisers have proper range settings, cuz 800 is the default range setting for cruiser vs cruiser.
They do…even if I set that though to 800, wouldn’t they move in closer considering it says MAX range and not range to stay at? Just tried it with them all at 100 range, they still stop for some reason.
As far as I can tell, ships don’t try to move in closer than the maximum range that you give them, unless another order tells them to. For example, if they’re escorting a ship who moves in very close, then obviously they’ll have to follow suit. Ships generally just stop at the maximum range you give them. Somebody please correct me if I’m wrong.
Evilmeat
Yes, Evil, that seems to be correct. They will initially move to maximum range. Once there, they won’t move again unless the enemy is outside of max range (even if they are below min range for all of their weapons).
The AI isn’t very smart, I’m afraid. Your best bet is to set your maximum range to the smallest of all of your weapon’s maximum ranges. You can do this just by clicking on the weapon in the list when setting the max range.
Hopefully Cliffski will improve on the AI in the future.
Edit: Oh sorry i was thinking this was talking about weapon ranges for a second hits head i guess i need more sleep. I set my ships with the keep moving order and that seems to keep them moving about, although they dont seem to have any real organization. maybe its how we layer the orders?