How to make fighters fight?

[Mylon]

This might sound like a silly question but... How do I get my fleet to behave semi-intelligently?  When I'm raiding a system, fighters and other short range ships don't get to do a whole lot.  Either I have everything in lone mode (and die alone), or I have everything in group mode and the short range ships never get to fire.  The melee ships seem to deviate from the orders decently enough to attack stuff along the way, but fighters don't do the same.

I'd love to see fighters swarming the big ships to protect them from bombers, but it seems without some intensive micro, short range ships don't get a whole lot of action.

[Tssbackus]

if you hold alt and then right click a place on the planet that you want the ships to end up to end up.

Then the ships will go in a straight line towards the spot you clicked.  if the frigites stop to attack a startship that is in the line then the fighters will go attack if it it in the range of the fighter's attack range.

[Lancefighter]

Honestly, this is the problem that seems to occur with most short range units. The thing about blade attack units is that they have a 'target seek range', the range where they will actually actively hunt something. Short ranged units do not, and therefore require an attack move (alt click), or to be placed in FRD mode (v click)