Confused with fleets as a new player.
Hello! I have just recently picked up the game, and been having tons of fun with it, but I am extremely confused by how strange the ai behaves in this game.
To put it short: I am trying to defend against Xenon in Hatikvah's Choice I, on default recommended start.
They have been harassing my traders and keep destroying them, so, I made a small fleet, consisting of a single destroyer, two frigates, and assigned each frigate 4 S sized ships, filling both them and the destroyer with defensive drones as well.
I have put them to defend the area just around the hyper-highway, and gave them destroyers subordinates orders to intercept, with the smaller ships set to attack with commanders (their frigates).
The way I expected them to work is:
The destroyer is defending a position around the hyper highway, specifically so that my traders would always be protected under it, the frigates are sent out to protect the destroyer, and the fighters assigned to the frigates are helping with that. The only way I found for the defense drones to work is setting them to escort, and as such, its the setting that I've set.
The way it actually went: The destroyer is spinning in place, often trying to target the xenon ships that fly into its defense radius, the frigates start chasing the enemies just fine, however their defense drones often do almost nothing, not even chasing their targets, just floating around. The fighters behave as expected, but they leave the frigate exposed, and, after experimenting with some of them staying on the "defense" setting, however those just fly off one by one for each individual xenon ship, get seriously beaten up, and never switch targets unless that ship dies, which leaves the frigates all the same exposed, forcing me to sometimes pull them away from the fight.
The issues arise when the amount of Xenon ships entering the area increases, the destroyer becomes a sitting duck, barely doing anything and being incapable of defending the frigates, because they fly off from the formation, and get assaulted by those Xenon ships.
The fighters chase a singular target, which is - arguably - fine, since they kill it faster and it is the expected behavior from me, but i still havent figured a way to leave some of them to consistently defend the frigates themselves.
And the defense drones... remain useless. Only cluttering the map screen..
My question to all of this:
Is my issue simply not having enough ships? Am I underestimating the amount of ships I need in order to both repel and defend the attacks?
Is there a way to make the frigates be more defended For example, make them stay near the destroyer, or, at least, make the defense drones more useful? Setting the drones to Defend quickly makes me hit the single-launchpad throughput issues..
Are there any fleet commands that allow the fighters to dynamically switch between attacking and defending?
Sorry if this is a long post, but I am struggling to find the correct answer to all of these questions so far, and I dont have the money in game to experiment as much as I'd like.