[CaptainAL]

THANKS Glyn! I tried the simulator in my game again and used various enemy ship classes. I have been using weapons/largest priorities first and have tried both strongest and weakest as secondary priorities. The simulator still targeted the same "decoy" ship class regardless (the decoy ships did not have the strongest shields in the tests). So I did some more involved simulator testing also; I copied ships from my enemy's designs as my own so I could categorize the variables. My tests showed this:

Largest/Smallest related to damage resistance (apparently only shield generator damage resistance points counted and not points due to the shield generation itself). Interestingly, the ship weight (KT) did not seem to matter; I used baseships with both 1500 KT and 1490 KT. I did not try using smaller ship sizes (i.e. cruiser vs. battlecruiser) so I do not know if that is a preceding factor.

Strongest/Weakest related to resource cost. The higher cost ships were targeted first every time, regardless of damage resistance, shields or weapons. In my tests with strongest priority my highest cost ships had no shields; even so, these were targeted first. Glyn, did you check the ship cost?

Has Weapons seemed to target based upon weapons presence only; it seemed independent of weapon quantity. As far as quantity, the targeting seemed random. I did not do enough testing to see if there was another relationship involved.

In my game I always had largest as my first priority before strongest/weakest (so as to target baseships first) and that is reason my ships always targeted the high damage resistance "decoy”. I assumed that largest applied to size only and that it would target based upon the second priority if all ships in range were the same size. Not so!

I think the info in this thread might be good for the FAQs, if anyone who can edit it agrees and has time.

Thanks all.