There is such a setting. There's an auto-attack range toggle between Gravity Well (ships can target anything in the grav well), Local Area (ships can move a little bit to target and get in range) and Hold Position (ships won't move on their own, only fire if anythin comes into range).

hold position on fleets is very useful for dealing with the mines. As a bonus any fleetless ships you send in will join that fleet, rally to it and not go off on their own.

it would be nice if the fleet AI were smart enough to just avoid mines though

it doesnt have to be smart enough to sweep them

you can set up hotkeys for most things if they don't already had one. check the menu.

You know, to be honest I don't remember. I know that if you set it for a fleet, any ship joining that fleet will match the setting, which should cut down on the number of times you have to tweak it considerably if there's no direct hotkey.

You can also set different ships within the fleet with different engagement ranges. Just set the fleet status first and then chang each group.ship after.

A quick fix for that, Orodum, is to just hit edit on one of your posts and accept (don't have to make any changes). The reply will show up right away then.

Ditto. Aren't these IT guys at work supposed to be, you know, pretty smart? Like, smart enough to know that IE6 is not the best thing in the whole wide world to have anymore?

FF3  acts sometimes weird too, especially on extremely long post.

On topic however, i've played the game since release and hadn't noticed those engagement range buttons. I've just disabled auto-attack and let strikecraft deal with mines with the help of a scout. Reminder to self: R-T-F-M!

That would sort of defeat the point of having mines - why have them if there's no effort on the part of the player to avoid them

Aha, there it is... under tactics management.  Serves me right, I've never really messed with the tactics or fleet management, I just group ships with ctrl-1, ctrl-2, etc like most other RTS games.  I'll have to mess with the fleets and see if they're worth using, looks like they'll keep the fleet in a tighter formation.

Thanks!

That's their primary role All the ships fall in formation to the fleet leader, and don't wander off outside the fleet's cohesion setting. It also cuts down on required micromanaging (unless, of course, you want to do it) in a neat way - if you have a fleet selected and show it to attack, only the primary combat ships will attack. The support ships (repair boats, debuffers/buffers) will keep in formation and focus on their primary duties rather than tickling the big boys with their space-pea shooters

to block off areas to ships.  that's the actual prupose of real-life mines, not neccesarily to destroy ships, but to force them one way instead of another, to slow them, and to force them to bring minesweeper ships with them when they go anywhere. mines are a slowing mechanism, and not expected to destroy ships, although occasionally they do.