[dogscoff]

I've seen some wierd behaviour in fleet battles lately.

I recently sent a fleet of havily armed battle cruisers in to finish off a few enemy ships whch had already been crippled by my nasty little engine-weapon frigates, but the fleet wouldn't go near the enemy ships - They just wiggled around in a crazy litle dance.

Turns out I had inadvertantly set one of engine-destroying ships as fleet leader. The leader (quite rightly) didn't consider the enemy ships to be valid targets because it's only weapon affects only engines, and there were no engines left for it to fire upon. The rest of the fleet just followed it.

Not sure what the point of this little story is, other than that fleet / ship / leader strategies are highly complex and often unpredictable.