SEV Gameplay question: Fleets

[Romulus68]

How do you make ships break formation?

Can you make certain ships or the whole fleet break formation at certain intervals during the combat? ie.....the Carriers break formation after they launch all there fighters or something along those line.

To make sure I understand. Breaking formation will cause the ships to act on their own orders based on how it was set on ship creation.

Follow up question....
Can you change orders on an already built ship?
If yes, is it a per ship order change basis or based on the design as a whole. IE....Ship class in "Attack One" and I have 5 "Attack One" ships built. Can I give 3 orders for short range and 2 at long OR the ships use the order set for the "Attack One" class making all 5 be the same order?

[AgentZero]

To break formation in tactical combat, you click the Break Formation Orders button, then chose whether you want the selected ship, all ships in the selected ship's task force, or all ships in the selected ship's fleet to break formation.

As far as I know there's no way of setting the orders for breaking formation to occur as in the example you've given. In Strategies, there is only True or False for Break Formation Immediately or Break Formation If Core Ships Lost, but that's all the attention breaking formation gets there.

And you're right, breaking formation causes ships to stop following the fleet/task force orders and start following the orders for that ship design.

Can you change orders on an already built ship?

I'm assuming you mean strategy and not orders, which are two rather different things And you can only set orders for a fleet, task force or ship design, but not individual ships seperately (thanks Fyron!). So you can't have one carrier that has Don't Get Hurt strategy and another that has Fighter Attack strategy, unless you make two different designs or stick them in a fleet.

To change the strategies of a design, go to the Design screen, click on the relavant ship, then click on the Change Strategy button.