Perhaps I’m missing something, but I’ve have thought deleting the ‘Attack Fighter’ order would at least deter my missile cruisers shooting at fighters. However, in the last battle, that’s all they did, despite being in range of enemy frigates and cruisers. Megaton Missile launchers are wasted on fighters one would think.
I am having a similar problem; I’ve tried deleting the attack fighters order and I’ve tried leaving it but at 0% priority and my missile/torpedo ships of doom still insist on firing their whole initial salvo at the enemy’s wave of fighters. Not only are said missiles wasted upon the fighters if they hit, they generally won’t hit.
I could try positioning my fighter-killer ships well ahead of my missile ships, but I’m thinking that the “please do not shoot that house-sized nuke at that oven-sized fighter” order should work.
Still lots of fun, anyway, as the missile ships do eventually stop shooting at the fighters when the bigger targets get in range.
All ships will fire on any ship if it is the only ship in range. The priorities are just that, priorities. If two or more ship types are in range, which one should be attacked? This is when the priorities logic is used
Cliffski did mention in another thread that he plans to add logic for having certain ship types completely ignored however.
I understand why the priority setting doesn’t prevent firing, I just tried it anyway. The deleting of the order looks like it should work because the description of “Attack Fighters” says “Engage enemy fighters with the given priority and ideal range. To avoid engaging these ships, delete this behavior.” Deleting the order does not cause the ship to avoid engaging fighters.
It’s worse for missile launchers because they won’t refire, even if they’re loaded, until the original missile has run out of fuel, been shot down, or hit.
I think this is intended behaviour (to stop missile spam - justified as someone needs to handle guidance and ECCM for those missiles), but it sure is annoying when your missiles are chasing fighters around.
Ah, that explains why I get this massive cloud of missiles spinning around chasing fighters they can’t hit and very little fire on the enemy ships until later. I didn’t think the reload times were supposed to be that long 
From what I can tell though, this is not happening. Obviously I can’t be 100% sure because there is no indicator on screen during a battle as to the actual range of the weapons being fired, but I’m pretty sure those 1100 range missiles are probably in range of something else while they’re shooting away at fighter.
Hmm, maybe his priority stack isn’t calculating correctly then. If only we had a secret debug mode that turned on weapon ranges and displayed each ships priority stack…
oh yes there is 
click a ship to show its details in the bottom right, then click the weapon to toggle its range circles on and off. red is minimum range, white is max.
It is possible that the ships you 8want* to fire at are within minimum range, and thus its shooting fighters instead.
Also ships gunners have code that makes them ignore temporarily any target they have shot at ineffectually several times in a row. If your missiles were all ineffective, they might be trying to shoot at something else deliberately.
I’m suddenly having a problem with some ships just sitting doing absolutely nothing.
Check their ranges. are they possibly out of range of their targets? It is possible to set orders for a ship where it will sit out of range and just wait.
Ah, I think that was it.
I had some missile and plasma ships actually -chasing- fighters just recently, even with a perfectly good enemy cruiser hiding in a corner out of range.
As far as I remember, they’d had target-fighters removed from their orders, but it may still have been there for some of them, at low priority.
They didn’t close with it at all, and another ship had to finish it off.
I’d really like to see some way of giving orders by weapon type as well as by ship type. e.g. if i have a ship with a mix of weapon types i’d like to be able to specify that, say, the heavy missiles and torps never shoot at fighters, but the PD (and maybe other beam weapons) still will.
So i’d like to suggest a new type of order - weapon orders, where you select a weapon type and give them target priorities which override the overall orders for that ship.
But there should also be some way to tell a ship/weapon to never target a certain class of ship. Either setting a target priority of 0% could be a special case which mean that the ship will never fire at that class, or maybe just deleting the order could do the same thing.
Confirmed. Whenever other target types are out of range, my missile boats fixate on and chase after fighters. The Attack Fighters order is deleted. I also tried at Attack Fighters at 0% as mentioned above. You can’t have a pure missile boat until this is fixed, use at least one anti-fighter module. Otherwise they can’t kill the fighters and will never acquire other targets. It’s hard to win a battle with some of your cruisers gone AWOL!
We should check if ignoring deleted attack commands is affecting other situations.