Hi,
there seem to be two ways to play this game, flagship and RTS/fleet command style. I prefer the latter and the auto-assign system is then often problematic.
It has been described using words such as "insane troll logic". Now in ordinary builds it is acceptable although it often feels like you are wrestling with some malicious force trying to override your intended strategy, but it's also occasionally useful such as when you have ships orbiting a "Defend" order. However when you are trying to do more advanced things, such as using one type of ship for kiting and another for fighting things become really difficult as it is unacceptable (and often lethal) for one category of ship to be assigned to an objective intended for another category of ship. Auto-assign works excellent when different categories exist, by the way: "rally civilian ships" is a great order to separate civilian ships from others or give them a default location without fuss. It is in fact so good that the order itself is a strong argument for using civilian ships to grab objectives as they can be reliably given a "grab it and then move away" command by setting a rally point and issuing a capture order.
For example, I'm currently trying a formation where Monitors defend an objective and Prometheus Mk. II hunt isolated enemies on the other side of the map. However, terrible things keep happening due to auto-assign where members of one group are assigned to objective intended to another, causing death, unless I am vigilant enough to prevent it.
I think some players might appreciate a "do not auto-assign ships" option in settings or even the config file, where instead of being auto-assigned to an objective ships that do not have an objective revert to the normal "search and destroy" behavior and ships can only be assigned to objectives manually. I can also understand if this is such a core gameplay concept that it shouldn't exist though, but figured I'd float the idea.
