Hi,
I set my oders up, designed a few ship and gave them the formation and keep moving order. Also I adjusted the attack range slider to 2000, so that there is always a target to be attacked. But soon afters the battle starts the ship fly in every direction, but not to the front. Most turn 90° or even fly back. The one or two ship that fly to the enemy are nearly instantly destroyed. I have to say: This sucks. What should I do? How do you get your ships to the front?
iuiz
hi,
don’t blame the game for your orders.
what did you expect? “formation” does exactly that: the ships stay in formation with the targeted ship. so they move wherever the targeted ship moves.
now you gave your ships attack range of 2000. there is no weapon with that range, but your ships try to maintain a distance of 2000 to the enemy, and thats why they turn around.
the formation order is best used with support ships.
for the rest, keep moving and co-operative/vulture is sufficient most of the time.
set the attack range slider slightly lower than your weapons attack range
greetings
driver
Yeah, the ‘maximum range’ part of the orders is a bit confusing. It actually means ‘get at least this close to the opposition’. So a ‘max’ of 2000, means your ships won’t approach past 2000. Keep moving means your ships will get a bit closer/bit further away, but they’ll still try to stay at least half the max range away - 1000 in this case, which is further than any weapon can shoot except missiles.
Usually, you want to set your range order to about 100 less than your main weapons.
With keep moving, you can get away with setting your orders a little over that, if you want to keep the enemy at arms length, since they’ll get a bit closer in their milling around.
Not sure what you meant by giving formation and keep moving, since as far as I know you’re still only able to have one of those enabled at once (but we have been asking rather persistently to be able to have them both (just with formation taking precedence until the formation target dies.)
He probably had the ships in formation except for the target of the formation, which was set to “keep moving”. I’ve tried that before but never really liked it.
“Keep Moving” in general is a pretty annoying command in that the ships are too erratic and unpredictable. It’s a shame because I think movement is the only decent defense against plasma spam, but it’s really only reliable if you wanted to do short range attacks. Keep Moving with a range of 200 will get your ships in close and keep them moving while staying close. Keep Moving with a long range gives them too much play.
Don’t blame the player for the game’s confusing description. It doesn’t say “preferred range”, it says “max range”–you’d expect the ships to stay inside the given distance, but move freely within it.
hi,
i didn’t blame anyone.
and actually the description above the two sliders says “ideal range”…
and you can’t expect the ships to move freely within the given distance, since this requires additionally the “keep moving” order.
or is there any sense in setting the distance to its maximum of 2000 without the “keep moving” order? (the answer is no, because the ship then doesn’t even move towards the enemy, but flies away once they approach. test it if you don’t believe me).
and why should i set the distance to 2000 if the ships are supposed to stay in weapons range and move around anyways?
greetings
driver
Yep! And the slider itself says “max range”, and the tooltip on the weapons listing says “maximum engagement range”. Pretty confusing!
Oh, you’re not wrong about the game mechanics. It all makes sense once you know how everything works. But it can be hard to figure out how everything works, because the descriptions are sometimes confusing and contradictory, which is why we have this lovely little forum for people to ask questions. 
Oddly, I have ships with perfectly normal orders that “run away” from combat, in that they tend to curve off the screen when following their Keep Moving order rather than angling back toward the theater of combat. Odd.
Though it’s oddly cathartic yelling at nonexistent ship captains that their stupid cowardice is what caused the survival rate to be so low. For me, anyway.
hi,
yes, it’s sometimes stupid that they leave he map and you can’t see what’s happening.
but there’s nothing odd about it, they follow their given orders, it just seems the map is larger than the part you can see 
greetings
driver