[Puke]

yeah, thats me. its possible, but not simple. there are 2 main classes of ship in a formation, those that can break formation and those that cant.

Those that can break formation are usually given dont-get-hurt orders and run to the hills. we wont wory about them (except for their tendancy to run to the OPOSITE side of the map, crossing hostile fire when all the near corners are taken)

anyway, this leaves you with your combatant ships to be placed into the formation. the computer orders the formation by what the order of ships are in the fleet. how do you reorder ships in the fleet, you ask? thats the trick.

you cant. BUT, the computer Groups them by class of ship. so your fleet list may look like:

DN; DN; DN; DN; DN; BC; BC

and your inverted V formation will end up ordered like this (pretend it looks like a V):

6; 4; 2; 1; 3; 5; 7

so you would have the DNs in the center and the BCs on the wingtips. If you want to do something truely clever with your formation, you need to figure out what order your fleet is being put into and then create your own formation based on that. which sucks.

The game is not to bad though, with how it orders fleets. you can usually find a formation that will be at least mostly intelligent, and then you might find it easier to build your ship designs arround how formations work rather than the other way around. play with a few formations in the simulator and you will see how they are setup.