Spoiler
Two scenarios spring to mind in which I'd want an avoid order.
A) A big, slow target and multiple smaller target are on the field. I want my ships to avoid the big one and kill the small ones to gang up on the big at the end.
B) A enemy is fleeing and one of my ships is in pursuit. I put avoid on the enemy to make my ship stay in combat.
In both cases a global avoid command would be better than "avoid if smaller". In A) One of my ships might match the big target, engage it, and delay the destruction of the small stuff. In B) my pursuing ship is probably not smaller anyway.
Hmm...How about "avoid if you are not vastly superior"? That would have the intended outcome in case A) and B). And it would eschew strange issues where a battleships tries to avoid a destroyer.
I'm not sure how aware ships of are of their allies, but if they could notice when they are "vastly superior" as a group scenario A) might even play out without the need to revoke the avoid order at the end.
Thanks for breaking those down - I wasn't thinking of B) at all, but that's a really good point.
"Vastly superior" is problematic for the AI to establish. How many frigates do you need before you're "vastly superior" to a Paragon? Seems like the kind of call best left to the player - it's hard for me to imagine getting it right often enough, especially when the penalty for getting it wrong is about as bad as it gets - dead ships.
B) could actually be mostly resolved with an AI tweak - don't chase a retreating ship if you're both out of weapon range by some margin and also slower.
A combination of "avoid if <not bigger | smaller | something else along those lines>" and the above AI tweak might be a good place to start. That, combined with direct-assignment to the avoid task acting like engage/strike, should give the right amount of tactical flexibility. I think. Going to give it a try and see how it works out - no promises, as usual
I can see giving it a try and ditching the idea altogether for one reason or another.
@xenoargh:
Pardon the short-ish answer, but I'm about to go to bed here
1: A distant possibility.
2: Probably not - how they work is not "final" in my mind, so I don't see making them more moddable before firming that up.
3: See #1.
4: The usual "nothing in vanilla uses it, so it'd probably be extremely buggy, and would lack UI support to tell the player what's going on". Which isn't a definite "no", it's just a "it'd take significantly more effort".
Overall, I just haven't had a chance to do a "moddability pass" during this cycle. I may yet get the opportunity (this usually happens when I'm waiting for some art or sound assets, but the functionality is already done), but it doesn't appear too likely. We'll see, though.