[Lerchey]

Some of the responses here seem a little confused. Let me restate the problem:

If a ship with a non-offensive combat strategy is (arbitrarily) assigned as the group leader and the fleet is sent into strategic combat ALL ships act on the leader's orders, and thus, the ships that should be offensive, are NOT.

I have some ideas about this, which I have not quite finished fleshing out yet. As soon as I do (most likely this weekend) I'll be sending the suggestion into malfador.

That said, here is the solution that I've been using.

I tend to build mixed fleets including combat ships, repair ships, and supply ships. Before I launch the fleet into battle, I remove the non-combat ships from it. At that point, since all that are in the fleet are combat ships, my fleet acts aggressively, as I would expect... UNLESS the leader is a point defense ship (shielded with only PDCs), in which case, the spin around doing little of anything uless the enemy has seekers or fighters.

Hope that helps,

John