What I found, is that if you turn off auto attack ship will not attack ANY thing unless you order them to. With out auto attack, they do not attak enemy ships when they are in range, or even when they themselves come under attack, by the same said enemy ship. In other words, they don't fire unless told to, not even is selve defense. Look at the Colony Figates, they come out of the yard, with auto attack off. That why they do not return fire, even when they are under attack, and are just waiting for the next line of orders(and yes colony ships have guns).

Setting tactics, to hold position just means, that the do not move(this is what I have seen so far). If it is still set to the entire gravity well, the ships, will move to attack any enemy ships that enters the well(as long as auto attack is on).

it depends on how your fleets are grouped.

If you create a fleet with LRMs and support cruisers/flaks... your LRMs will move into position to attack the target you click on and the support cruisers/flaks will stay close by. If they are not in a fleet however your units may scatter all about.

Your flaks may chase fighters and bombers all over the grav well unless they are in a fleet. They they will stay close to that fleet and provide defense cover.

Turning off auto-attack means the ship will not fire at all, unless you click the attack button and click a target. Then once that target is dead it will stop firing. I wouldn't mess with auto-attack unless you have a very good reason to.


The best thing to do is create fleets of various units. The units in the fleet will behave intelligently... your attack vessels will attack while your support vessels will hang back and support. Again, if you dont' create a fleet, you may wind up with units doing silly things.