At the moment you can assign ship types to group up at a location which costs a command point (which is fine), but the ships don't attack (strike group) unless they are given an order to do so which also costs a command point. This seems a bit silly to me as personally I run out of command points in longer battles when I have to continually reassign strike orders to my ships.
As a personal suggestion, don't use many strike orders. I usually give at best 2-3 strike orders in big battles, against a small selection of targets. Strike orders aren't really needed for anything but capships and a bunch of slow moving targets.
Also, assigning ships to escort other ships cost command points yet if you do not assign ships to guard other ships then the AI tends to break off and go on their own. Could this be looked at either to make the AI try to work as a team a bit more or to make it so that it isn't so costly to assign escorts?
Again, as a personal suggestion, don't use many escort orders. Just a few ships "need" some babysitting, mostly slow moving capships or civilian vessels. The fact that the AI break off may seem counterproductive at first but you'll soon see that most ships are capable of surviving the heat of battle without amassing with other allies. As a matter of fact trying to stick together might sometimes be the worst possible solution, limiting maneuver space.
Oh and on another topic I was wondering why a lot of ship AIs don't stay/get into range so that they can fire upon the enemy. An example is on the campaign with quite a few of the frigates on different set ups (different load outs, beam or ballistic based) the ships seem to stay at the maximum or just out of their firing range and never actually do much in the fights.
I'm actually struggling with this to. The default AI is conservative to the point that sometime I see hounds attack not even once during a whole combat (if they're equipped with weapons with range shorter the the vanilla chaingun).
