Fleet control

[Sardia]

I put 3 light cruisers and a destroyer in a fleet. When I send them into tactical battle, I sometimes am unable to control the ships individually. If I give them a move order, it does not follow. I can only move them as a group. Other times, they break formation when I want them to.

What causes this? Is it the designation as escort and picket? Does it have to do with how I select the ships initially?

[Dan_]

I think you can only give move orders to the leader of the task force, so you would have to have that selected. The others just move to stay in formation with the leader. As far as I'm aware, being an escort or picket has anything to do with movement, rather just determines the position in the formation. The way to override this behavior, and what I find works best anyway, is to set the strategy the task force uses to break formation immediately - see strategy settings under empire options. You might need to do this for the strategy the ship designs are set to as well, but from what I've seen the task force strategies override the ship ones. There might be a break formation button or something similar in the tactical combat you can use too. If you do this, by default the ships move to try and keep the range you set in the strategy from their target.

The fleet formation is still handy though as it gives you some control over the starting positions of the ships.

[Sardia]

That's the thing, most of the time, it is perfectly normal, where I can control each ship individually. Sometimes though, I can only control a leader of a task force and it gets really annoying.

P.S. Has anyone noticed that under the capture planet strategy, it has launch all units under combat set to true?
How are you gonna capture a planet if you keep launching away your fighters? And yes, I know troops can't be launched, but fighters are better and more versatile.