Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: Bingeling

Short answer: You can't.

You have discovered the main, micro management way, spam orders to do something else. You can for instance give a fleet a chain of order to for instance attack each mine in a system in turn, and then for instance refuel (to get out). They will not be distracted.

What happens in your case, though, is that the ships lose their orders, and try to figure out a new one. They probably have the engagement stance "attack system targets". You can change this with a button, I forget exactly where, but look at top right or lower right corner around the selection panel.

The next problem is that this resets whenever they get a new order, so when the order finishes they are back at "attack system targets".

To prevent this, you have the most obscure option menu in the game. Bring up the game menu (escape should work), select options, settings or whatever it is called. This is the original option screen. Somewhere in the middle you have a button saying something like "empire settings" and this is the screen you need.

Here you can among others: Adjust default engagement stances. Turn of automatic mode for newly built ships. Suppress all popups (nice for running automated games). And adjust overmatch (a slider that should influence how many of your ships targets each enemy ship/structure at the same time). So if you change the default engagement stance to something more peaceful, you should avoid seeing your ships go after that enemy colony.

I would not do so, however. I like that my ships in general want to kill enemy stuff. If you change it you will probably end up in a situation where you go "Why are my ships not jumping over to attack the pirate in the system?"

Also, even if you change it to "when attacked" or something, you will see your guy fighting an enemy ship and winning. The enemy tries to escape and jumps back to the colony and its spaceport. Your attacker follows, and is shredded by the spaceport.

So my solution: Destroy the enemy planet defenses. Either that, or don't try to hang around inside that system.