So, despite playing Starsector since the beginning, I never really understood Escort orders. I'm not sure if I'm just not getting something or if they maybe really don't make complete sense.
There are five ways of ordering an escort - Light, Medium and Heavy Escort, Defend and manual assignment of ships. There appear to be complex rules hidden behind the first four, that's why I almost always use manual assignment.
Let me try and brake down my issues:
1) If I manually assign too many ships (more than three cruisers) to escort a target, it automatically generates a Defend order and assigns even more ships than I intended - why? Please don't do that. I have to carefully identify and manually un-assign the ships I didn't want, which is a pain.
2) The same issue, less severe, happens if your manually assigned ships get disabled. The game automatically assigns a new ship, which is rarely the one I'd want/tactically appropriate.
3) Is anyone actually using Light/Medium/Heavy Escort orders? I find them highly unpredictable und unreliable, and how could they not be? The game doesn't really understand what the role of each ship in my fleet is supposed to be (even if there is a Monitor next to me I get assigned a Kite), or how their relative positions matter (please don't assign frigates to the rear that are about to reach an Objective).
Or is this actually exclusively meant for inexperienced players who have no idea which ships go well together? Because other than in this function, this seems like a case of the game trying to be too smart and ending up looking dumb.
4) What does Escort actually mean - is the escorting ship supposed to defend the escortee, to give it fire support or to be protected by it? I think the game differentiates between these depending on the ships involved, but I'm not sure if it always gets it right. There are certainly many cases were a vulnerable ship ends up in front or a tanky ship ends up in the rear, but this could be due to general maneuvering, I guess. Unfortunately, I cannot see what the game is trying to do and can't manually change the escort purpose. I'd love more fine grained control (or at least information) here.
So, can someone enlighten me how to properly use these orders, or what else their purpose might be? Should they maybe be better explained or changed in some way? Because with my current understanding of them, I would argue that the whole automatic escort behavior and Light/Medium/Heavy Escort orders could be completely removed from the game. Or, at least, manual assignment should no longer generate a dynamic escort order.
On the other hand, I would not mind an even more off-hand approach - if I could give a standing order to automatically assign escort orders (following the logic the enemy admiral AI uses), so I can focus even more on piloting when I want, that would be neat.