boarding question

[Puke]

Im fairly new to the board, so this may be an obvious question:

(talking strategic combat here) I have built boarding ships to sieze enemy vessels, and when given orders to 'capture enemy ship' they will hold back until the shields of the enemy ship are down. while this may seem like a good thing, it means that after a targets shields drop, they have to spend enough time to cross the map and carry out their boarding operation. durring their travel time, the targets are often destroyed by my attacking ships that brought the shields down in the first place. is there any way to overcome this without arming attack vessels with nothing but shield depleting and weapon destroying beams? not only is it a far riskier operation when the attackers have to go in with limited weapons, but thoes weapons are not available until a ways down the tech-tree

What would be cool (maybe there is a way to do this?) is to have the boarding ships follow a bit behind the attacking force instead of hanging out on the map edge. since there is not a command for "follow behind the vanguard ships" maybe something like "stay at maximum weapons range" but the problem is that you cant give tactical orders to a ship after it has been given capture orders, and any other type of strategy you might want to give it is superceded by the 'capture ship' orders.

ideas?