Newbie Q: ship placement in combat?

[Vezzra]

Originally posted by oleg:
Ahh, I see You used "wall" formation but since you come from the side, your waal is turned by 90 degrees.

Strange... when I played non-simultaneous games, this always worked properly. When I attacked from the side, the wall went top-bottom, with the ships facing left or right. When I attacked diagonal, the formation was crunched into the respective corner, IIRC.

One thing I didn't pay attention to, but came to my mind today: Obviously my ships moved and fired first, seems as if the game treated them as defenders. No idea why. My ships moved into the sector, so they should have been the attackers. No enemy ship entered before battle occcured, only afterwards a single ship entered, and was destroyed in the second battle.