Q - shielded fighters and anti-shield weapons

[jim]

Often, a stack of fighters (say 20) will be targeted by my ships non-PDC weapons in Simultaneous Movement games.

If the fighter design includes one or more shields, then shield-sapping weapons will fire at them. If a non-fighter ship no longer has shield strength, the shield weapons will switch to shoot at a target that retains shields.

The problem is that the shield hitting weapons will ALL fire at the fighter stack but w/o effect. That is, the top fighter may not have shields left, but the shield-hitting weapons cannot hit any fighters below the top fighter. The shots thus become wasted. The AI will shoot the shield hitting weapons uselessly at the fighters even if there are shielded warships in range.

Maybe this is best explained with an example. Assume I have 5 baseships each with the Talisman, 5 PDCs, 2 shield-hitters, and 8 APBs. Say I am in a battle with 10 DNs and one Carrier. The Carrier launches 20 fighter stacks at me who race ahead of the DNs.

The PDCs do modest attrition, but do not kill the fighter stack in range.

Next, all the shield hitters will expend themselves uselessly on the fighters. Then, as many APBs as necessary will shoot at the fighters, if they were in range.

Next, the DNs and the baseships fight, but the DNs have their shields untouched.

The effect is so bad that I have had to abandon using shield-hitting weapons. Telling the baseships not to fire at fighters is not likely to be a success, I would think.

So, why do the shield-hitting weapons still fire at the fighter stack after the only one they can affect has had its shield zeroed by the first hit?