When I order a ship to capture/defend/assault a point, I expect them to carry it out at all costs or die trying. I get frustrated by scatterbrained captains that go out of their way to attack a lone passing ship while another steals the point out from under my AI controlled ships. Curiously, I seem unable to do the same to the enemy unless I totally destroy the opposition with my flagship first.
As a counterpoint - I would want my carriers to
not stick closely to their rally point or die trying - so on a carrier I would put a 'cautious/independent' captain. Probably the same with cruisers for me. But for frigates and fighters, the more 'disciplined' the better. The more I think of this, the more I think that a huge amount of captain behavior could be controlled with just leash length.
As a Combat/Technology junkie, I do not have spare CP to waste on fixing my ships aberrant behavior.
To me this is an incentive to
keep some of this behavior. By taking combat and technology, you should be giving something important up. If part of that is that ships perform better when given more orders than I am completely in favor of it (and for fighter fleets its already true - assigning specific targets to stack strengths vs weaknesses makes a huge difference).
Also I'm not really sure that the behavior is all that aberrant. Currently ships are fighting cautiously and getting distracted by enemy contacts - sure it needs some tweaking, but that seems like a pretty good description of a combat unit to me
. If we had some greater ability to change that behavior as a commander though, that would be nice. Maybe there should be a direct order to the effect of "sit here and make a stand" that takes a command point, does not call units after the one/many assigned die, and allows for a very short leash. Actually, I'm going to go suggest that...