[General Battuta]

And since the outcome of the battle was fixed anyway, it didn't make a huge difference on a balancing level.

[Dilmah G]

Yeah, and I barely had enough time to look at the diversionary strike force (or whatever their name was), the fighters were doing a good enough job of occupying me

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Wow a whole page and no one mentioned the obvious.  Both can be better than either one.  Waypoints 89 with an attack of 50 isn't a bad thing at all.  I've had to do this on occasion to get the ship to fire on the other ship(s) like it should.  Just waypoits orders does not always result in ships firing when they should be. 

[TopAce]

I thought a ship could carry out only one order at a time; in this case, "follow waypoints 89".

As for the thread, I usually use AI orders for up to corvette-size, and waypoints or no orders at all for larger.

[headdie]

If i can chip my 2 pence into this one.

In any tactical situation (land/sea/air/space) with 3+ units in combat the best core strategy is to focus all your firepower on either the greatest threat or easiest to remove threat thus quickly pushing the odds in your favor so for example

Team 1
3 cruisers 1 destroyer
Team 2
3 corvettes 1 cruiser

Team 1 will focus on either singling out a corvette and destroy it then move onto the next to remove the ships posing the highest threat or the cruiser to reduce the number of guns pointing at them quickly increasing the time they have to punch the corvettes

Team 2 will will either focus on singling out the cruisers because they can quickly wipe out the majority of the enemy's guns and the ability to maneuver and bring guns to bare in optimum positions.  or focus their firepower on the destroyer because it represents the largest single concentration of firepower.

all the above depending on the team's command deciding is the better strategy and what is the most important ships.

So attack orders actually add a dimension of plausibility especially when dealing with trained and organized forces

Also waypoints are fiddly, I find best used in convoy pathing otherwise you spend hours play testing and refining waypoint positions by millimeters and then having to re time later stages of the mission because ships end out of the positions you originally designed.  also you still end up eventing AI instructions if two opposing ships pass by you don't want engaging at that moment or you need to them switch targets to a ship over the other side of the mission.

[Dilmah G]

Most of your tactical ideas are really FRED-ing things rather than default AI behaviour.