So, I’ve started to notice (yes, it’s a bit late) that the Formation order is not exactly working out to my benefit.
To my understanding, the Formation order tells a ship to maintain its position in relation to another ship as best as possible - so I put the PD ship in front of the mainline. Yet, boot up a battle and that PD ship promptly begins to creep behind that mainline, giving it a nice face-full of missiles for its troubles.
Is there something I’m not getting here? And yes, I am ensuring that their speeds are adequate.
What range do you have you’r PD ship to engage at if its longer than your other ships then it’ll stay away from the fray (sorry about the illiteration :P).
If the PD ship has a formation order with another ship that is faster than it, it will try to keep up, but will inevitably fall short causing your formation shape to change. Thus, to maintain formation, you want to have the faster ships get orders to stay in formation with the slower ships.
I noticed a slight lag between when a ship moves out of formation and when the ship with the order moves into position. If you put ALL the formation orders on one ship, it fixes the problem well enough, The One Ship will be slightly ahead of the rest of the formation, so make sure it is a ship at the rear.