Probably the two least used and best commands are harass and avoid. Avoid tells your fleet to avoid that ship, obviously, and the berth given is like 2k+ Units. And your fighters won’t attack or bomb it either iirc. This works pretty well until you have to avoid too many units because the enemy fleet still likes to stick together at least a little bit and so too many avoid commands means nothing can get shot terribly well.
It works exceptionally well on very slow ships and while the conquest isn’t terribly slow it’s slow enough to save your destroyers and many cruisers from getting flattened. Once the rest of the enemy fleet has been solved you can remove the avoid command and flatten the ship now that it’s surrounded and out matched.
The harass command will have one frigate or destroyer (or ship you specifically designate) just like… bug the ship. It will back away when the ship is trying to close and then it will close if the ship is trying to back away. You know when that frigate is just like… annoyingly back there and you turn around to deal with it and it bails? AI is probably harassing you.
Harassing is a good option when you cannot strictly avoid (maybe too much density of avoid commands) and when you can be reasonably assured the ship cannot turn and crush the harasser.
Thanks for the advice. In my first/standard run, I used those two a good bit and found them very useful.
In my most recent run I haven't been, so I'm sure I'm not helping myself there.
That said at this point ("Chaos factor"-ing the base factions, not to remnants+ yet), I'm running a couple herons, three conquests, two champions, and two omens (With gunnery+ officers), and the only real problem I have is one or two of them wandering off, overextending, and dying.
With me on the front, if they would sit within screen distance of me and cover flanks/support fire, we can chew through anything as the AI mispositions one by one.
How can I keep them from doing that? I've set a defend order on myself at this point, I think I've tried a defend point order slightly behind me, but they're all Aggressive officers (from the frigate/destroyer times) and my current guess is that's my mistake.
Are harass and avoid things that can help me in that scenario? Should I just avoid the deathball positioning in general and try to maintain the same line into surround the AI does?