[Fyron]

If you have missile ship, use Max Weapons Range. Make sure to change the secondary strategy for this one from Point Blank to Optimal, cause you don't want your missile ships to be right up in the front lines.

For direct fire ships, I mostly use Short Weapons Range, or sometimes Optimal Range.

If you have Talismans, then it is usually a good idea to go with Max Weapons Range so that you can get the most out of your 100% to hit. At long ranges, your enemies will have a hard time of shooting at you, while you can't miss. This also works with Wave-Motion Guns and Anti-Matter Torpedos, cause they get natural to-hit bonuses (which you have to look in components.txt for, cause they are not listed inside the game).

[Edit]If your direct fire ships get a lot of experience (as in 30 or more), then it might be a good idea to set their strategy to Max Range. Their experience will allow them to hit at longer ranges, so take advantage of this. Your enemy's ships will have a harder time hitting you, while your experienced ships will still be able to hit most of the time.[/Edit]

It is a good idea to change every strategy so that all vehicles break formation. This eliminates the ships scrambling into fleet formation while moving themselves out of weapons range. This also allows your ships to use their individual design strategies, instead of the generic fleet strategy. This allows for more effective combined-arms fleets, because your direct fire ships will move into range, while the missile ships will stay towards the back, removing them from the direct fire weapons of your enemies.

[Edit]
For a fleet with only one class of weapons, just set the fleet to the same strategy that you have the ships set to (ie Max Range for missiles or Short/Optimal for direct fire). For a combined-arms fleet, it can get trickier. If your fleet has a large majority of one type of ship, then set the fleet strategy to that of the majority. If the ratio is roughly equal, then it depends on your enemies for which strategy it is best to set it to. If the enemy uses a lot of missile ships, then you should use Short Weapons Range so that you can try to close in with the direct fire ships. If your enemy uses mostly direct fire, then set the fleet to Max Range, so that you can minimize the enemies opportunities to fire. Of course, if you set all ships to break formation, then all of this because irrelevant because your ships will use their own strategy and ignore the fleets. Of course, you need to make sure that you set every ship design's strategy in the ship design window, or else they will use Optimal Range, which could be bad.

And also, do not trust the combat simulator for how your ships will perform in real game experiences. Basically, the simulator is a POS, and it is not always accurate.
[/Edit]

[ 14 January 2002: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]