As it stands, selecting multiple ships shows the orders given to one individual ship. Could we get the game to display the intersection of the orders given to all selected ships? That’d make it easier to assign orders to ships as a group–I often find myself trying a challenge a second time and adding new ships of a certain design already present, and as it is now I have to find the new ones and select only those as a group to assign them the same orders as I had on the old ones.
You can just right click on the already existing ships and save orders before deploying more of them. That being said, I would like to see the ability to double click on a ship and have it automatically select all ships of that design on the battle field so that you can adjust all of their orders as a group, since it is sometimes impossible to multi-select them (and just them) if you have other ships interspersed in the formation.
That functionality is already there.
That functionality is already there, but the implementation is lacking–it will show orders for one of the ships (it appears to be the first one deployed), and if all the ships don’t already have the same orders, then modifications to (for instance) escort distance will only take for the ones that actually have the escort order.
Say you have three cruisers of the same type. One has Escort, two don’t. If you select all three cruisers, Escort will show up, allowing you to modify the slider, but that only takes effect for the cruiser that already has the escort order. If, on the other hand, it showed the intersect of orders, I could double-click select my three cruisers, add a new Escort order for all three of them, and modify the escort distance for them as a group.
Wow, it is! That is extremely helpful - I thought I tried it before and it didn’t do anything, but perhaps I was using different designs. It also looks like control clicking for multi-select works, even though I also didn’t think it worked either. Anyways, sorry to derail the original suggestion - I agree that having some way to clone the orders of one ship to the rest that you have selected would be helpful. Currently the best way to do it is to simply delete the original escort order and add a new one.
Indeed, which is one click more than I think we ought to need. 
I also find this annoying. So you are suggesting that when 3 ships are selected, if…
ship 1 has order A B and C
ship 2 has order B
ship 3 has orders B and C
that the list shows just order B?
I guess there is no final solution because when selecting a group of ships with different orders, you will always get fooled into thinking their orders are the same. In the example given, you would assume wrongly that none of them have order C, even though 2 of them do. I’m not sure what the best solution is, tbh.
I would prefer to see the AND method that you showed, because it’s probably (debatably) more damaging to show orders listed when they aren’t. Perhaps you could list all the different order sets within the group and give options to assign them all one of them, or assign one group another groups orders? Might be quite a bit of work though.
Yeah. I suppose it does make it harder to mass-remove orders, too.
Maybe have a toggle somewhere for OR vs. AND behavior? Maybe at the very bottom of the orders pane. Call it something like “Show all orders” and “Show common orders”.
Or Cliffski on the example you gave (which I think would be the good behaviour), to avoid the confusion, maybe let all orders in the list, but grey them. (A and B are in the list but greyed) so the player knows that some of the ships could do it.
And of course let a choice to cancel all orders.
If the greyed list is still confusion, maybe print a message if a player is tying to select a greyed order telling that not all selected ships can perform taht order.