Recently an experienced player complained on Discord about a case where a Lasher escorting an unshielded mod carrier failed to protect it from a unidirectional threat and let it die instead. The old escort order might have prevented this.
Other people noted that as it is, whether in 0.8 or 0.9, the Escort order's behavior only covers one use case for "ship A follows ship B", when multiple such broad cases exist. There's also the issue of the tooltip not being able to communicate all the subtleties and not-so-subtleties of its behavior (again a problem with both old and new Escort).
On the other hand, we also don't want to increase the complexity the player is presented with more than necessary.
On the third hand, not having specific options to "do this particular thing" also adds complexity except in a worse way: it makes the player employ weird workarounds to get the behavior they want (one example mentioned was using an Escort order to keep ships together till they encounter an enemy, then cancelling it to let them fight independently).
To that end, I think the following would help:
1) Split Escort order into three orders, covering the broad use cases:
- Escort: Focus on covering target's flanks and rear, but default to attacking if this is not needed. Like the current behavior but with some tweaks.
- Screen: Previous version's escort behavior; allow the screener to take shots for the screenee. Should be default assignment when the target ship is civilian or a non-combat carrier.
- Assist/Accompany: Follow target ship around on a short leash and perhaps try to attack its selected target, but otherwise act independently.
2) Instead of right-clicking instantly applying the default command, make it open a context menu with the available commands.
(This would also help with the thing when I try to give a combat carrier an Eliminate order but it gets Fighter Strike instead and I have to manually change it)
3) (Maybe) Remove heavy escort, because it just clutters the UI right now. I've never encountered a case where any vanilla or mod ship needs that much stern-covering, and if it does the player can just manually assign more ships to the medium escort.
4) Regardless of whether any of the above ideas are implemented, Escort order should be added to fleet command tutorial.